Lawrence W. Levine (1) (1933–2006)

In The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History, Lawrence W. Levine argues, “Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries American colleges and universities have been engaged in attempts to open themselves to new areas of learning, to new ways of structuring education, and to new constituencies of students among the middle and working classes, women, immigrants, and minorities. These attempts have led to intense struggles within universities over the depth and breadth of their curricula and the nature of their mission” (pg. xiv). The title paraphrases Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which Levine argues paradoxically suggests that a broadened focus of study curtails traditional education, itself a paradoxical term. Levine continues, “Fears of an eroding hierarchy and the encroachment of a democratic society into the academe, as reflected in both the curriculum and the student body, are at the heart of many of the critiques of contemporary education” (pg. 11-12). Levine counters, “The American university no longer is and never again will be homogeneous, and much of what we have seen recently in terms of speech codes and the like are a stumbling attempt to adapt to this new heterogeneity. The major consequence of the new heterogeneity on campuses, however, has not been repression but the very opposite – a flowering of ideas and scholarly innovation unmatched in our history” (pg. 28).

Discussing the development of higher education, Levine writes, “The passions that burned in the administrators and faculty of American colleges had more to do with preservation and nurturing than discovery and advancement” (pg. 39). To this end, “Academic history in the United States… has not been a long happy voyage in a stable vessel characterized by blissful consensus about which subjects should form the indisputable curriculum; it has been marked by prolonged and often acrimonious struggle and debate, not very different from that which characterizes the academe in our own day” (pg. 43). The modern canon of literary works and the structure of western civilization courses developed during the Progressive Era and World War I as a way to Americanize students and create a homogenous culture. In turn, academe had already begun moving away from these systems by the end of World War II. Of the change, Levine writes, “Western Europe was indisputably the point of origin of some of our most influential national values, attitudes, practices, and institutions. But as anyone who studies culture seriously should know, the point of origin is only part of the story; it has to be balanced by a comprehension of what happened to the values, practices, and institutions after they arrived” (pg. 159). Detractors of a broadened curriculum “don’t mount a scholarly campaign against this work; they don’t attempt to disprove it with their own scholarship; they simply denounce it as ‘politically correct’ and ‘injurious’ to the national tradition, as ‘trivial’ distractions from the essential political and diplomatic work of historians” (pg. 165). Levine concludes, “A people’s culture is safe only insofar as it continues to ceaselessly examine and understand itself” (pg. 169).… (más)

In The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History, Lawrence Levine cautions against the historiographical rebuttals to cultural history, writing, “If too many previous historians have tripped over their own cultural umbilical cords, it is because they were poor historians and not because they were tragic prisoners of an inevitable cultural myopia. The historian who cannot significantly transcend the culture of his youth, the needs of his present, and the hopes of his future in order to come to terms with the past deserves repudiation, but we must take care not to transform his failures into unbending laws governing all historians” (pg. 31).

Discussing Shakespeare performances in the nineteenth century, Levine writes, “The relationship of an audience to the object of its focus – be it a sermon, political speech, newspaper, musical composition, or play – is a complex one and constitutes a problem for the historian who would reconstruct it. But the problem cannot be resolved through the use of such ahistorical devices as dividing both the audience and the object into crude categories and then coming to conclusions that have more to do with the culture of the writer than that of the subject” (pg. 155-156). Turning to historians’ previous reticence to study jazz, Levine writes, “Popular Culture, in spite of its name, did not have to be truly popular in order to win the title. It merely had to be considered to be of little worth aesthetically, for that became the chief criterion: the cultural categories that became fixed around the turn of the century were aesthetic and judgmental rather than descriptive terms” (pg. 173-174). In examining the popular culture of the Great Depression, Levine uses Superman as an example of how to closely read an artifact of popular culture in the context of its time.

He writes, “This growing perception that it was less and less possible to achieve traditional ends through the existing system helped to give birth to a new folk figure in the late Depression years. In 1938, Superman made his first appearance in Action Comics and became the prototype of a host of heroes who were to become prominent in American culture” (pg. 227). He continues, “Superman was important because his alter ego, his fake identity, Clark Kent, was a caricature of what individuals had become in an organized, depersonalized world: faceless, impotent, frustrated. Kent could transform himself by taking off his clothes; the rest of society could react through the world of the mass media” (pg. 227). Further, “The popularity of Superman symbolized public unrest with the institutions and bureaucracies that more and more shaped the contours of everyday life” (pg. 228).

Levine uses the photographs of the Great Depression as examples of why visual sources require context to be useful to historians. He writes, “Photographic images, like statistics, do not lie, but like statistics the truths they communicate are elusive and incomplete” (pg. 262). He further cautions, “An understanding that these icons reveal not merely the external but also the internal realities, not only appearances but also beliefs, is an important key to comprehending their significance and their meaning” (pg. 282).

In his final essay, Levine summarizes, “We have found it difficult to study Popular Culture seriously not primarily because of the constraints of our respective disciplines – which are indeed far more open to the uses of Popular Culture than we have allowed ourselves to believe – but because of the inhibitions inculcated in us by the society we inhabit. From an early age we’ve been taught that whatever else this stuff is, it isn’t art and it isn’t serious and it doesn’t lend itself to critical analysis” (pg. 295). Discussing the issue of audience reaction, Levine writes, “Recent literary theory sees neither the reader nor the text as necessarily controlling but rather places emphasis upon the interaction between the two. It is precisely in this realm that we have to understand the process of Popular Culture: not as the imposition of texts upon passive people who constitute a kind of tabula rasa, but as a process of interaction between complex texts which harbor more than monolithic meanings and audiences who embody more than monolithic assemblies of compliant people but who are in fact complex amalgams of cultures, tastes, and ideologies” (pg. 304). In this, Levine points the way forward for future cultural historians.… (más)

This book is rightfully a landmark text. Well researched and pact with facts this text covers black music, black humor and black heros. I've gave this text 3 stars b/c at times this book was really just a chore to read as is with most academic centered text. I really felt like i was reading something by somebody that got paid by the word. I don't know whether its an issue of the writing style or me just losing interest after the 7th or 8th example of a particular concept. Anyways still a worthy addition to anyone's library… (más)

In Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Lawrence W. Levine writes, “The idea that Americans, long after they declared their political independence, retained a colonial mentality in matters of culture and intellect is a shrewd perception that deserves serious consideration” (pg. 2). Levine argues, “Because the primary categories of culture have been the products of ideologies which were always subject to modifications and transformations, the perimeters of our cultural divisions have been permeable and shifting rather than fixed and immutable” (pg. 8). He further argues, “In the nineteenth century, especially in the first half, Americans, in addition to whatever specific cultures they were part of, shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival boxes than their descendants were to experience a century later” (pg. 9).
Levine argues that wealthy, established men viewed the dawn of the nineteenth century “with a sense of loss, looming disorder and chaos” due to their fears of losing cultural authority in an increasingly democratic society (pg. 173). Levine writes, “In an industrializing, urbanizing nation absorbing millions of immigrants from alien cultures and experiencing an almost incomprehensible degree of structural change and spatial mobility, with anonymous institutions becoming ever larger and more central and with populations shifting from the countryside and small town to the city, from city to city, and from one urban neighborhood to another, the sense of anarchic change, of looming chaos, of fragmentation, which seemed to imperil the very basis of the traditional order, was not confined to a handful of aristocrats” (pg. 176). He continues that immigration and new groups threatened the established order. According to Levine, “These worlds of strangers did not remain contained; they spilled over into the public spaces that characterized nineteenth-century America and that included theaters, music halls, opera houses, museums, parks, fairs, and the rich public cultural life that took place daily on the streets of American cities. This is precisely where the threat lay and the response of the elites was a tripartite one: to retreat into their own private spaces whenever possible; to transform public spaces by rules, systems of taste, and canons of behavior of their own choosing; and, finally, to convert the strangers so that their modes of behavior and cultural predilections emulated those of the elites” (pg. 177).
Turning to those who promoted high culture, Levine writes, “The desire of the promoters of the new high culture to convert audiences into a collection of people reacting individually rather than collectively, was increasingly realized by the twentieth century. This was achieved partly by fragmenting and segregating audiences so that it was more and more difficult in the twentieth century to find the equivalent of the nineteenth-century theater audience that could serve as a microcosm of the entire society” (pg. 195). Order played a key role in this transformation. Levine writes, “If order was a necessary prerequisite for culture it was also one of culture’s salutary by-products. If without order there could be no pure culture, it was equally true that without culture there could be no meaningful order” (pg. 206). He continues, “True art required standards and authority of a kind that was difficult to find in a country with America’s leveling, practical tendencies” (pg. 215).
Levine concludes, “The blurring of cultural classifications has been accompanied by the efforts of producers and performers of drama, symphonic and operatic music, and other forms of high culture, to reach out to their audiences in ways not known since the nineteenth century” (pg. 245).… (más)