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PARTISAN REVIEW
for the present and a nostalgia for some putatively "purer" and nobler
time. With all this in mind, it seems to me that the word
entertainment
is a better one than
popular
or
mass
culture.
It
too of course has certain
difficulties and incurs some losses, but it's at least freer of the leveling
or deadening or falsely sanguine action of those other terms, and freer
too of
parti pris. Entertaining
is a more supple word, one that can be
useful to describe a quality of art and imagination across a broad
spectrum, a word whose resonances might help to reduce the puritani–
cal strain in academic considerations of culture, and might even be
usefu I in resolving some of the seert:linglY irreconcilable differences
between critics and adherents of so-called "high" and "low" cultures.
Entertainment
is a category-since we have to have one, that is
sufficiently supple to contain the essentials of what I have to say, even
though in these remarks
I
shall continue also to use the words
popular
or
low
or
mass
culture because others use them and the implications of
these uses make up, as you can see, one of the subjects of my talk.
Which now proper! y begins.
Is there a body of criticism of popular culture or entertainment or
at any rate of imaginative expression which for one reason or another
people of purportedly "higher" taste and fuller learning tend to
exclude from what is thought of as serious expression or art; is there a
body of such criticism that meets or approaches the criteria that have
been traditionally held up for criticism in general? You'll notice that
I
say nothing at this point about whether or not such exclusion is
justified or whether or not the criteria are worth preserving; those
things remain for a later stage of my remarks.
We all know that there has been a great deal of serious writing–
I'm not talking about reviewing-in recent years about these ostensibly
less serious forms on the part of people we recognize as critics, or
scholars, or who claim the name or some other name for the broad
activity. Conferences and symposia proliferate on the subject and there
is even a
Journal of Popular Culture
which at first glance looks very
much like many journals of "dignified" culture such as
Partisan
Review
and about which I shall be talking at considerable length later
on.
The truth is that a very large proportion of this writing and
discussion, nearly all of it it sometimes seems, has been either advoca.cy,
aggressive or rather embarrassed, or, in an older and more familiar
vein, denigration. To write or speak about popular or mass forms of
expression, about entertainment, hasn 't often been an act of inquiry–
except on a sociological or psychological level, and then seldom with
