Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate Teaching: The Place of the Middlebrow in the Academy

Abstract

Numerous negative connotations adhere to the middlebrow, and my students are quick to sustain them. Typically they stress that middlebrow literature is the kind of literature that is not studied in college. More specifically, they tell me that the middlebrow is ‘easy reading’, that it attracts ‘less educated audiences’ and that it is inexplicably, sometimes maddeningly, ‘popular’. They would agree, I think, with the unnamed Dial critic of the 1920s, who suggested, in characterizing the novels of best-selling American author Edna Ferber, that the middlebrow ‘puts no strain on either the emotional or the intellectual equipment of [its] very gentle readers’.¹ That such severe and longstanding critical judgements, often unexamined, have filtered down to twenty-first-century undergraduates is easy to demonstrate: just ask them. Most students, by the time they reach college, have internalized the notion that the texts we teach in school are somehow different from the larger body of mainstream books, and the difference, as they understand it, can only be explained through appeals to ambiguous notions of literary ‘quality’.