Evento

Disrupting the Canon: High Culture, Low Brow, and the Space In Between

What is the difference between exemplary art and pop culture trash? How are these distinctions determined? And who is allowed to determine them? Categories of high and low brow pervade
every form of media we consume: the Booker Prize winner vs the most recent Nora Roberts romance, the arthouse film vs the popcorn superhero flick, the graphic novel vs the comic book,
the HBO prestige drama vs to the network sitcom, The Witcher Series vs Madden NFL. The perceived difference between these categories determines their cultural capital, influencing not
only what we read, watch, and play, but also how we judge the media consumption habits of others. We confess to guilty pleasures, a term that admits to enjoying a novel, television show, or genre, while still indicating that we discern its inferior quality. Moreover, the categories of high
and low affect not only what we consume, but how we consume it, what is worthy of our time and attention, what we study, and what we teach.
But these categories are socially constructed and can evolve over time. Yesterdays bawdy performance at the Globe is todays critically-acclaimed Elizabethan drama. So why and how
does such cultural evolution occur? This conference seeks to interrogate the distinction of high, middle, and low brow texts as well as their political, social, historical, and educational
implications. How are categories of cultural prestige used to maintain social, racial, gendered, class, and linguistic power structures? How does canon formation reproduce and reinforce
cultural hierarchies and hegemonic values? Whose voices are amplified by the labels of art and literature, and whose are excluded and thereby silenced?