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Nobrow, American Style

From Goldilocks to the Golden Mean

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When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow

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Abstract

Chapter 3, Peter Swirski’s “Nobrow, American Style: From Goldilocks to the Golden Mean” defines and refines what we mean by nobrow. Starring in this part of our story are three amicable bears and a golden-curled cutie who, through an act of culinary theft, clarifies the principle that hums at the heart of artertainment. What follows is the story of nobrow as a cultural formation, as a creative strategy, and as an aesthetic reception strategy. It takes us into the inner workings of artertainment through encounters with marvels as diverse as the King of the Jungle, the grooviest of grooves, and the recent raft of award-winning “flockumentaries” spliced together from snippets of YouTube videos.

What do you get when you cross highbrow aesthetics with lowbrow genres? An identity crisis.

—Nobrow joke

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On apocalyptic and integrated scholarship, see Eco, 1994.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, Swirski, 1999, 2005, 2010a; 2016a and 2016b; Seabrook, 2000; Anderson, 2004; Jordan, 2005; Collins, 2010; Menand, 2011.

  3. 3.

    Swirski, 2005.

  4. 4.

    In Raab, 2000; on McBain, see Swirski, 2016a, chapter 5.

  5. 5.

    Tilley, 2012; on the Lowbrow Art Movement (aka Pop Surrealism), see Anderson, 2004; Jordan, 2005.

  6. 6.

    Swirski, 2005, chapter 2; 2016a, chapter 1.

  7. 7.

    A recent acknowledgment of normative fallibility comes from the 2015 New York Review of Books: “Now widely considered a masterpiece, If This Is a Man was turned down by Turin’s main publishing house…it was also rejected by five other publishers” (Parks, 2015, p. 28); for other examples, see Swirski, 2005, chapter 2.

  8. 8.

    Levine, 1990; Boas, 1940.

  9. 9.

    Swirski, 2015b; see also Swirski, 2010b.

  10. 10.

    Rankine, 2015, p. 24; on the dominance of popular culture, see Williams, 1989; Carroll, 2000.

  11. 11.

    Jameson, 1991, p. 316; Larkin in Campbell, 2015, p. 32. Eliot’s 1948 essay was Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Oddly, when it comes to popular culture old Marxists like Adorno or Guy Debord and New Marxists like Jules Serroy or Gilles Lipetsky stand shoulder to shoulder with old and new conservatives like Eliot or George Steiner.

  12. 12.

    Swirski, 2015b; on rap, see Swirski, 2015a, chapter 4.

  13. 13.

    More, 1516/2003, p. 10; More wrote in Latin, the lingua franca of the eliterati of the day.

  14. 14.

    See Meisel, 2010, p. 6; as such, Meisel is dead wrong in endorsing Mencken’s timetable.

  15. 15.

    Brooks, 1915, p. 491.

  16. 16.

    See Frend, 1992, p. 26.

  17. 17.

    Rubin, 1992; Radway, 1997; Hammill, 2010.

  18. 18.

    Driscoll, 2014, p. 9; my italics. In another crucial departure from the “new” middlebrow, nobrow as a cultural formation goes back to the dawn of the twentieth century (see Swirski, 2005, p. 10).

  19. 19.

    Menand, 2011, p. 76; on two-way traffic, see Swirski, 1999, 2005, 2016a, 2016b.

  20. 20.

    See also Dalziel, 1957; this stratification is predicated on the classical social model of five classes—see BBC News, 2013 on seven social classes in the UK.

  21. 21.

    For discussion and bibliography, see Swirski, 2005.

  22. 22.

    Swirski, 2010b, p. 165; see also Swirski, 2005, pp. 44–45.

  23. 23.

    Witek et al., 2014; also Keller and Schubert, 2011; Berlyne, 1971.

  24. 24.

    Wilson, 1998; Tomasello, 1999; Carroll, 2001; Swirski, 2007.

  25. 25.

    See Turner and Poppel, 1983; also Poppel, 1989; on chronobiology, see Macar et al., 1992.

  26. 26.

    Holub, p. 3.

  27. 27.

    Kauffman, 1995.

  28. 28.

    Davies, 2006; Kidd et al., 2012.

  29. 29.

    Swirski, 2015b.

  30. 30.

    See Swirski, 2010b, chapters 2 and 3. In a like-minded experiment in academia, the introduction to the scholarly collection I Sing the Body Politic (2009) was executed by Swirski et al. in a series of “blind” round-robins.

  31. 31.

    In Dodes, 2011.

  32. 32.

    Swirski, 2010b.

  33. 33.

    Cooper, 2015.

  34. 34.

    For a recent analysis, see Darnton, 2015.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Distinguished Professor of American Literature and American Studies, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Peter Swirski

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  1. Peter Swirski
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Correspondence to Peter Swirski .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Sun Yat-Sen University , HONG KONG, Hong Kong

    Peter Swirski

  2. University of Helsinki , Helsinki, Finland

    Tero Eljas Vanhanen

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Swirski, P. (2017). Nobrow, American Style. In: Swirski, P., Vanhanen, T. (eds) When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95168-0_3

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