Abstract

Pop goes the culture

The article focuses on the book "Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America," by Paul Gorman. In this book Gorman traces, convincingly, a long tradition of leftish suspicion and misunderstanding of the mass audience, which intellectuals idealized, demeaned, tried to prescribe various brands of "authentic" and uplifted folk culture to improve its health, but never really understood this audience. Offering an anthropological conception based on the work of author Clifford Geertz, Gorman argues for reading mass entertainments not literally but rather as "narrative vehicles designed for making the world intelligible and providing emotional pleasures," as Geertz famously put it, viewing them as "good to think with."