From Lowbrow to NobrowFrom Lobrow to Nobrow demolishes the elite argument that popular fiction and culture are the underside of civilization. In this innovative book, Peter Swirski goes beyond demonstrating that "high-brow" has been transformed to "low-brow," showing that nobrow art is the interactive factor in the relationship between popular art and highbrow art. Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction, vindicating it as an art form that expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers. He follows his insightful introduction to the socio-aesthetics of genre literature with a synthesis of the century long debate on the merits of popular fiction and a study of genre informed by analytic aesthetics and game theory. Swirski then turns to three "nobrow" novels that have been largely ignored by critics. Examining the aesthetics of "artertainment" in Karel Capek's War With the Newts, Raymond Chandler's Playback, and Stanislaw Lem's Chain of Chance, crossover tours de force, From Lowbrow to Nobrow throws new light on the hazards and rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics. |
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academic aesthetic American artertainment artist avant-garde become bestseller Betty Big Sleep book publishing Brandon canon century Chain of Chance Chapter classics complex conventions crime critical critique Czech death detective fiction detective story elite entertainment example fact fantasy formula game theory Gardiner and Walker genre fiction genre literature Hammett's hardboiled hero highbrow highbrow fiction human individual intellectual interpretive intertextual Investigation John junk fiction Karel Čapek Lem's liter literary look lowbrow Marlowe mass culture ment murder mystery narrative Newts nobrow novel paradox pattern percent Philip Marlowe philosophical play Playback plot Poodle Springs popular art popular culture popular fiction popular genres popular literature Praise of Newspapers Press pulp fiction Raymond Chandler readers reason Red Harvest romance sci-fi science fiction social Stanislaw Lem story-types studies Swirski T.S. Eliot thriller tion titles tive ture typically victim words writer
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Page 9 - Procrustes, you will remember, stretched or chopped down his guests to fit the bed he had constructed. But perhaps you have not heard the rest of the story. He measured them up before they left the next morning, and wrote a learned paper "On the Uniformity of Stature of Travellers" for the Anthropological Society of Attica.
Page 12 - The critic, one would suppose, if he is to justify his existence, should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks ... in the common pursuit of true judgment.