High Culture and / versus Popular Culture

Edited by Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Dorothea Flothow.

This volume brings together 15 papers given at the 18th British Cultural Studies Conference, held in Salzburg in 2007. As the title "High Culture and / versus Popular Culture" suggests, it addresses an unsettled issue. On the one hand, it recalls the dissatisfaction with the distinction between high culture and popular culture characteristic of both post-fifties debates, which resulted in a complete re-orientation in cultural criticism, and of more recent suggestions of the 'collapse of boundaries'. On the other hand, it calls attention to the many ways in which this distinction still makes sense, as has been argued in defence of cultural pluralism. Dealing with literature, music, the theatre, film and television, the papers collected in this volume address the following questions: Does high culture 'borrow' from popular culture? Or vice versa? What kinds of transformation or adaptation between the cultural hierarchies are involved? Why, when and how do the relationships between high and popular culture change, either within a single cultural phenomenon or among different ones? What do such changes mean in terms of taste, class and gender as well as in terms of genre, form, and language? If high and pop are more conveniently considered as working terms rather than as having any essentialist connotations, who categorizes cultural products as 'high' or 'low' or 'popular'? Who is interested in such distinctions? Who negotiates these terms - 'high', 'pop', 'low', 'high-pop' - between a work of art, the artist/producer, and the recipient/consumer? - Contents: Sabine Coelsch-Foisner: Preface: High Culture and/ versus Popular Culture. - John Storey: Discourses of the Popular. - Jürgen Kramer: On the (Im-)Possibility of Distinguishing Between High and Popular Culture. - Joe Grixti: Blockbuster Art and Elitist Pulp. Textual Discrimination in the Age of Commercial Media. - Susanne Gruss: "A few flowery phrases and he thinks I'm his". (Re)Appropriations of Wordsworth in Contemporary Literature and Film. - Elisabeth Klaus: From Documentary to Reality TV. The Downfall of Public Television? - Heinrich Versteegen: TV Judges and the Law. Popular Culture vs. Legal Culture. - Vicky Angelaki: Breaking Down Barriers High and Low. The Case of the UK's National Theatre. - Rita Gerlach-March: "Gutes Theater". Categories of Evaluating Quality in British and German Theatre. - Sarah Fekadu: Refusing the Division Between High and Low. Virginia Woolf's Use of Music in "Between the Acts". - Hugo Keiper: "No Ordinary Love". 'Saxie Sade' and What They Can Teach Us About Pop Lyrics as Avantgarde Poetry. - David Malcolm: "No More Than Pub Anecdotes". High Culture and Low Culture in Julian Maclaren-Ross's Short Fiction. - Norbert Lennartz: Lord Byron's "Don Juan". The Epic Poem as Pop Culture. - Joseph Eugene Mullin: Roth's "Great American Novel". Another Plot Against America. - Joachim Schwend: The End of The Curious Old Shop. Woman as the Self-Confident Consumer. - Ingrid von Rosenberg: Culinary Into Literary Pleasures. Reflections of the Current Popular Food Craze in Selected Recent Fiction. - XI,208 Seiten mit 14 Abb. und 9 Tab., gebunden (Wissenschaft und Kunst; Vol. 12/Universitätsverlag Winter 2009)