The Book of the Month and the Middlebrow: Why do we care about the Middlebrow?

I wonder why it was so important for the critics of the Book-of-the-Month club to maintain the clear demarcations between high-brow and low-brow, between culture and the market. It seems that these intellectuals wished to separate themselves from the ‘masses’, and had a great interest in doing so. However, while Radway stressed their own economically-associated interests in criticising the book club, she did not provide reasons why this maintenance of exceptionalism was so necessary.

Following Radway’s characterisation of these critics as middle-class professionals, the individual identities of this ‘cultured elite’ are represented by Richard in The Secret History: as individuals with capitalist backgrounds taking on a transparently false identity to try to fit in with the crowd of the old-world, moneyed, classically-educated upper class. Acceptance into this group is seen by its members as a validation of individual self-worth through cultural superiority. It is therefore in the best interests of the members of this group to retain this superiority through exclusivity, elusiveness and disdain for non-members - as demonstrated by the critics of the Book-of-the-Month-Club.

However, in the new world, the forces of the capitalist market determine what remains and what becomes extinct. The characters in the novel spend their time learning a dead language, and ancient texts with little applicability to the modern professional world. The consequences of their intellectual isolation and separation eventually lead to murder, suicide and the group’s disintegration. The values of this elite society are so far removed from the world which surrounds them that their inability to connect the two eventually leads to their demise.

Perhaps, then, the proponents of the high-brow should not feel threatened by the rise of the middlebrow, but should see it as a bridge connecting it to contemporary relevance. The establishment of the middlebrow has enabled new consumer markets to access and appreciate literature. These economic forces may pull high-brow culture down from its elusive and exclusive position, but may also maintain its existence through its accessibility to a larger group of people.

The ‘cultured elite’ have disdain for their high-brow texts being traded and valued on an open market. They value these texts according to their personal utility, as a family heirloom is valued by its owners due to sentimental attachments. However, to the disappointment of these sentimentally attached owners, the value of texts as commodities reflects only what another is willing to pay for it, not this value-in-use. This means that others cannot appreciate the value of this item to the same extent as its prior owners.

The high culture cannot escape its commodification, as it now can be bought and sold (for example, books going in or out of print, university humanities departments' funding determined by numbers of student enrolments). Through allowing the ‘masses’ to access and understand these texts, more people may come to appreciate them as do the intellectual elite. Their value-in-trade may then increase, more closely reflecting its value-in-use as more people will be able to see the worth of these texts, and therefore perpetuate their value by purchasing them.

Tartt, D., 2006. The Secret History. London: Penguin.

Radway, J., 1993. "The Scandal of the Middlebrow: The Profesisonal-Mangerial Class and the Exercise of Authority in the Literary Field" from A Feeling For Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire. London: University of North Carolina Press.

Literary Value and Canonicity: The Value of Value

After reading Hernstein-Smith and Guillory I became very much convinced that ‘literary value’ is nothing more than what its valuers happen to value. In other words, the categories of ‘valuable’ and ‘canonical’ are arbitrarily defined by the tastes of those who are valuing texts. According to Guillory, it appears that those texts considered ‘canonical’ are simply those valued by those in the most powerful positions within a society. But why must the canon exist, and why must some texts be valued over others, and the proponents of these texts seek to perpetuate their value?

I think the answer to this comes down to cultural reproduction. Guillory states that Smith ‘confines the aesthetic function to the biophysiological level’. I think it is interesting to look at the value of texts from a biophysiological perspective. Perhaps, in an extreme sense, valuable texts are essential for our survival. While we will not necessarily die if we cease to read Shakespeare, our social systems are founded on the traditions of the past which are repeated, adapted and improved upon in the future. It is important for present generations to transmit cultural values onto future generations in order to ensure the survival of the group using the practices that have worked in the past. So therefore various cultural practices, such as the reading of Shakespeare, exist in a system of biophysiological survival and prospering of the group.

Our education system values the texts that were taught before, and this creates a new generation of readers whose tastes follow on from those of the previous generation in a similar but adaptively different way in the process of fitting to a new external context. Guillory claims that Hernstein-Smith conceives canon formation as a process of the ‘survival of the fittest object’. Therefore, those texts which belong to the canon are those that have happened to be adaptable to or suitable within their external environments. I think that Guillory’s problem with this argument is that it is these texts that shape those environments through their role in the formation of the reading subject. So the canonical texts themselves, by being valued and taught, ensure their survival in the future.

This doesn’t appear to be a problem to me, as this is the natural function of culture: to promote the repetition of the values of the past in the future. It seems that the texts we value are those we have been taught to value throughout the entire formation of our subjectivity. One cannot argue that texts can have some inherent value, because this will be entirely based on the personal values of that reading subject, determined by culture, as taught through the reading of the canon. Whichever way one chooses to value a text: be it based on popularity, its application of conventions, its complexity, its reflection of ‘truth’, these values will always be contingent. There is no more to literary value than the taste of the reader, but it is the canon which (in part) determines these tastes.

Therefore, it is the canon which ensures its own existence, survival and form through its status as a culturally reproductive agent. The idea of the canon, of ‘literary value’, is what creates and sustains the canon. The canon is not reflective of value but the engine which perpetuates and changes itself to ensure its survival in the changing environment. Perhaps value is shaped by the contingencies of Hernstein-Smith’s communities of readers, but it is also the contingency which shapes these communities.




Hernstein-Smith, B., 1988. Excerpts from Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

Guillory, J., 1993. Excerpts from Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Reading like a professional: Accounting for it

I think that traditional criticism attributes significance to texts through rationalising them. These scientific methods of approaching a text have been used as a way of explaining it, defining it, and therefore controlling it. I think this is what Felski refers to as being ‘suspicious’ of a text, and Edmundson sees as treating the text as an enemy. Through approaching the text on these terms, the critic is able to contain it and conquer it, making it a topic on which we can have some kind of knowledge or certainty.

However, these approaches to texts seem to deny the affective responses the texts usually initiate. It is these responses that usually give these texts their value to us. As students of literature, we have engaged in Edmundson’s process of this ‘second socialisation’ into the world of reading in a way that has had significant personal impacts. Reading has the potential to create affective reactions strong enough to alter our lives, impacting the decisions we make (for example, to study literature at university), the structure of our imaginations and general way of seeing the world. It is these affective responses that initially draw us to literature and give it its importance, so to exclude these responses from criticism is to deny our reason for criticising them in the first place.

While engaging in a quest for knowledge about the text, the scientific approach diminishes the importance of this knowledge. I agree with Felski’s point that ‘one of the distinguishing marks of works of art is their ability to inspire intense responses’. These intense responses are what gives art its value, what sets it apart from other objects. To deny these intense responses, and art’s potency as ‘the quintessential mood-altering substance’ is to deny its importance to us. It is the affect that gives art its power, so this power should be valued and put to use.

Traditionally, emotion and affect has been seen as irrational, existing in opposition to intellectual pursuit. However, perhaps this affect can be reconfigured as a resource from which more information about the text can be gathered. There must be a reason why we enjoy some texts and not others, there must be reasons why we can find a plot devastating or uplifting, truthful or false. We do not need to reject ‘readings’ altogether, or avoid scientific-style approaches, but we can use these affective responses as an extra piece of information to help us interpret texts.

Felski’s idea of ‘reflective reading’ seeks to find this middle ground between critical and uncritical reading. Through engaging in this sort of criticism, the analytical process is no longer performative and alien to our personal experiences of texts, but representative of them. In Felski’s words, this process enables us to determine ‘why texts matter to us’. This seems to fulfil a functional and important role of the critic in society: to account for our reactions to texts through various critical approaches. Whether or not we perform ‘readings’, whether we are suspicious of or friendly toward the text, whether interpretations are rational or affective, the important thing is to keep the criticism relevant to the text’s readers.

It is therefore important to follow Edmundson’s advice and ‘befriend’ the text, approaching it ‘on its own terms’. To try to impose some foreign, preconceived idea onto the text is to strip the text of any actual significance it might have had, instead foregrounding the significance of the ‘reading’ given to it. We should not need to be told to ‘befriend’ the text, because we are all here because we are its friends. We need to acknowledge and exploit this friendship, using our critical capacity to reinforce and promote its value to us.

The criticism does not need to be definitive or certain. A text is not a problem that we can figure out. Through engaging both the affect and the intellect, the ‘reflective’ approach seeks to rationalise the irrational responses to it. Perhaps we can never know we understand a text, but we can know how we feel about it.



Felski, R., 2009. "After Suspicion" from Profession 28-35.

Edmundson, M., 2009. "Against Readings" from Profession 56-85.

The Author: What is a reader? What is a text?

Barthes describes all texts as ‘performative’, as exclusively ‘given in the here and now’. I understand this in the sense of theatre and performance art. That a person speaking on a stage will only become ‘comedy act’ if the audience is laughing. In this way, a novel is a different text each time it is read. No text can exist independently of observation and interpretation. For a comedy act to exist, both speaker and audience must agree that the joke is funny, this funniness depends on the cultural context and its conventions.

If a text is a performance, ‘containing no other content than the act by which it is uttered’, then its content can only exist in its being read and interpreted by another. But who is this reader? Each time a text is read, the individual will approach it with a different set of experiences, moods, ideas. Just as Barthes claims the text is written by a disembodied hand, so the text may be read by disembodied eyes. While an individual reader may exist within the same body with each reading, it will be a somewhat different reader each time. Therefore, with each and every reading, the text is created anew.

If a text is created anew each time it is read, then what is a text?

It seems that if a text is recreated each time it is read, then two readers could not say that they have read the same book, and a person can never read the same book twice. A counter-argument would be that the words on the page were the same, or the story was the same, but words may carry a slightly different meaning for each interpretation, and stories can be repeated many times in what we would consider to be different texts.

A writer records thoughts using the conventions of a language to organise them. According to Saussure, these thoughts are already organised by and constructed through linguistic conventions, and cannot exist independently of it. The individual mind is structured through a collectively shared language. Both the process of text construction and text interpretation involve engagement within a public discourse. One cannot deny the generative meaning-making power of this discourse through attributing the text’s construction to the individuals with whom it engages. Perhaps it is not the individual that creates the text, it is the conventions of language. It is only in this way that the writing hand can be disembodied.

That clichéd saying ‘no man is an island’ comes to mind here. No individual exists without interaction with others. And nobody is able to read a text without prior engagements with other texts and with the linguistic conventions that enable one to understand the language in which the text is written. All readers participate in communities of other readers and writers. The human condition is one of engagement in continual dialogue, interpreting linguistic forms and configuring them to convey meaning. In this case, when one reads a text, one is really reading that which has been read before in a modified fashion. A reader cannot read a text without the existence of some other prior text. Therefore, it is this prior text which enables the existence of the reader.

I think that if the author is dead, this does not mean that the reader is born. In an abstract sense, the text has as much of an impact in creating the reader as the reader has in creating the text. Perhaps this is an equal triangular relationship between author-reader-text. Perhaps the author cannot be said to be the authority over the text, but neither can the reader. As both reader and writer engage in a mode of public discourse in encountering a text, these are all on equal grounds, each engaging in an ongoing refiguring of the other.



Barthes, R., 2002. "The Death of the Author" from David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds) The Book History Reader. London and New York: Routledge. 221-224.