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Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982)

Autor de Masscult and Midcult

27+ Obras 683 Miembros 11 Reseñas 1 Preferidas

Sobre El Autor

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Obras de Dwight Macdonald

Obras relacionadas

Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1917) — Comp., algunas ediciones169 copias
The Tales of Hoffman (1970) — Introducción — 74 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Fecha de nacimiento
1906-03-24
Fecha de fallecimiento
1982-12-19
Género
male
Nacionalidad
USA
Educación
Yale University
Ocupaciones
movie reviewer
Organizaciones
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature, 1970)

Miembros

Reseñas

Dwight Macdonald entered my world as a film critic, but I was delighted to discover he was a critic of the larger scene at the time. This collection of essays expresses that the idea of "American Culture" did exist, but it was a subset of the larger world of European culture, and should be measured by the same international standards. His particular mindset was "One should not say that X was a pretty good idea for an American", but measure it against the best idea or music or drama known and set it in its place in the larger frame. Yes, Herman Wouk should be set in the scales against, say Alexandre Dumas, why not. Also he was a good man at a wisecrack. The essays are still readable and had a future in the reprint world.… (más)
 
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DinadansFriend | otra reseña | Oct 22, 2021 |
Quintessential mid-century curmudgeon of an essayist. We could use more provocateurs of Macdonald's ilk these days - our criticism is by and large one of permissiveness, consensus, and mutual back-patting.

Highlight essay for me was the review (evisceration?) of Webster's 3rd, which could be read as a kind of prologue to David Foster Wallace's much more famous "Authority and American Usage" a classic essay in its own right.

Don't think I've chuckled this much reading essays almost all 50 years old, and I doubt I will again unless I seek out more of Macdonald's oeuvre.… (más)
 
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Aaron.Cohen | otra reseña | May 28, 2020 |
My long history with this book, first purchased in Minnesota, a couple years after attending fellow-grad student parties with Garrison Keilor, who was a couple years older, and in Journalism, not English. Memorized completely "You are old, Father William," Lewis Carroll's spoof on the Poet Laureate Southey's preacherly "In the days of my youth I remembered my God,/ And He has not forgotten my age." (280)
I had learned some by heart at age 7, lying on the couch listening to my older brother practice it for his Elocution lesson. Of course, I knew it before he did, to show off. But what a great choice that Elocution teacher in Springfield MA made (around 1950). I celebrated my brother's retirement with an imitation of Carroll's parody:
"You are old, Brother David," young Alan proposed,
"Yet you look just as dapper as ever.
It can't be form jogging, or picking your nose;
It's those sermons that you deliver."

"You lie," Brother David replied to the youth,
In your subtle and nuanced suggestion.
You know I stopped jogging, I swear it's the truth,
When I attained to the age of discretion."

This Parodies tome I claim to have read fifty years ago, but I have found hidden interstices in the last couple weeks off my shelf, aloudreading on morning walks. [I walkread all of Paradise Lost two Springs ago, 30 minutes a morning -- 300 to 400 lines--, mostly aloud: Got to "Through Eden took their solitary way" in less than a month. Seemed shorter than the half dozen times I had read it before. Fave line this time, "To sit in hateful Office, here confined"--Sin guarding the Gates of Hell.] But back to Parodies: Never knew of Keats's parody of Wordsworth, "On Oxford": "…The plain Doric column / Supports an old Bishop and Crosier…There are plenty of trees,/ And plenty of ease,/ And plenty of deer for the Parsons;/ And when it is venison, / Short is the benison,--/Then each on a leg or thigh fastens."(80)
Delightful discoveries: Mrs John Milton's diaries, as "preparing dinner has not been as much fun as I anticipated, because John cannot abide hashed meats." John Galsworthy, Browning galore, and various Whitmans, but also Dickinson and Frost, "Mr Frost Goes South to Boston," with "That's the way with buildings and with people."(230)
Of course, I read with heightened attention as I bring out my new book, Parodies Lost, with my versions of Ashbery, Angelou, Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Wilbur and many more.
… (más)
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AlanWPowers | 4 reseñas más. | Oct 28, 2016 |
Macdonald writes that “our traditional culture has been under increasing pressure from mass culture” for two centuries, and “Masscult” is winning. He doesn’t think you can “raise the level of our culture in general.” He’s for making a clear class distinction, where an intellectual elite has its High Culture and everyone else has Masscult.
Of Twain, Macdonald says The Mysterious Stranger is the only “sustained flight” Twain managed; Huckleberry Finn would have managed it except for the last hundred pages. Reviewing Ellman’s biography of Joyce, he says Joyce was a “specialist,” essentially uninterested in contemporary writers, art, travel, or politics. He praises Agee but finds his masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men uneven. His piece on Hemingway parodies that writer’s style: “he always worked close to the bull in his writing. In more senses than one señor….After 1930, he just didn’t have it any more.” He thinks Hemingway’s contribution is “as a stylistic innovator” and he compares Hemingway’s “extreme mannerism” to Jackson Pollock’s break with conventional painting.
This section about writers who more or less bear out Macdonald’s thesis about the attack of mass culture on high culture is followed by a section titled “Pretenders,” which has three reviews of books he didn’t like. The first is James Gould Cozzens’ By Love Possessed. The second is a 1956 book by Colin Wilson titled The Outsider, that talks about people both historical and fictional who have felt themselves outsiders. The third is about Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, 1780-1950. All of these books have had critical success that puzzles Macdonald. Macdonald dislikes Williams’s cultural materialism, since it is a socialist version of the approach to culture Macdonald rejects in the first essay in this book, “Masscult & Midcult.”
The last two sections (“Betrayals” and “Examinations”) are the real meat of Macdonald’s book: here he goes into detail about the triumph of mass culture over high culture in the specific forums of dictionary-making, Bible translation, and do-it-yourself education in the form of the Great Books series and how-to books. About the Great Books, Macdonald points out that the editors, Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, don’t seem to be aware that there are questions and problems about such a selection. It’s easy enough with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, but then it gets difficult. Whole works or selections? And then the scientific treatises, which Macdonald thinks are impenetrable, with no sort of apparatus and a predilection for whole works. The selection, though, he thinks is the best part of the Great Books. Translations seem to have gone for the public domain ones, turning verse into prose, often several centuries old. The index volumes Adler calls the Syntopicon get nothing but contempt from Macdonald. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which came out in 1952, Macdonald says has many problems, the chief being “a competitor that has been in the field for over three centuries and has been fatal to all contenders up to now”—the King James Version. Macdonald thinks the RSV has departed from KJV “in ways that seem to be legitimate, and many, many more in ways that do not.” His main complaint is that “RSV is a prose Bible, while KJV is a poetic one.”
An important part of the book is Macdonald’s contemptuous review of Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1961). Macdonald does not like the idea that language is determined by usage—that is, how most people are using the language at a given time. He thinks it is the business of dictionary makers and teachers to put on the brakes to language change, to enforce standards of correctness even as the words they police are disappearing or morphing into other meanings. These are functions that the second edition of Webster’s International in 1934 happily embraced and that had been part of dictionary-making since Johnson, according to Macdonald. The change came about, in Macdonald’s view, because of the increasing power and authority of Structural Linguistics, which has become dominant in language study since the second edition was published.
About how-to books Macdonald wants to make it an American phenomenon, though he is forced to admit we have always had them, from Ovid’s Art of Love to Benjamin Franklin’s homely advice. He is inclined to respect the practical ones that really tell you how to do something. He has good words for Spock’s baby and child care and Gesell’s book about child development. He despises the philosophical ones (“how to be a good person…here the howto reaches its nadir”).
… (más)
 
Denunciada
michaelm42071 | otra reseña | Dec 12, 2014 |

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