- general process of intellectual, spitual and aesthetic development of a particular society, at a time
- a way of like
- works of intellectual and especially artistic significance
Popular
- well liked
- inferior kinds of work
- work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
- culture actually made by the people themselves.
Banksy vs Convent Garden vs Grafitti in the streets not in a white box room.
Matthew Arnold (1867) 'Culture and Anarchy'
Culture is - 'the best that has been seen by the world'
- a study of perfection
- attained through reading writing and thinking
Culture policies 'the raw and uncultivated masses'
'the working class... raw and half developed...long lain hidden amidst it's poverty and squalor...now issuing from it's hiding plcae to assert an Englishmens heaven born priveldge to do as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it likes' (1960) p 105
F.R. Leavis
Mass Civilisation & Minority Culture
Fiction
& the Reading Public
20th Century sees a decline in culture
Standardisation and levelling down
- Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy (anarchy)
- Nostalgia for an era when the masses exhibited an unquestioning deference to (cultural)authority
- Popular culture offers addictive forms of ditraction and compensation
- ‘This form of compensation… is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends, not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habitutaing him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all’ (Leavis & Thompson, 1977:100
Fr
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