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Useful fiction: Why universities nee...

Ho, Melanie.

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Useful fiction: Why universities need middlebrow literature.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Useful fiction: Why universities need middlebrow literature./
Author:	Ho, Melanie.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2008,
Description:	309 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 70-07, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International70-07A.
Subject:	American studies. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3335940
ISBN:	9780549900092

Useful fiction: Why universities need middlebrow literature.
Ho, Melanie.

Useful fiction: Why universities need middlebrow literature. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2008 - 309 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 70-07, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2008.

This dissertation is a defense of middlebrow literature and the values that it promotes. I focus on American novels from the 1920s to the 1970s, since culture in this period would first be segmented into categories of high, middle, and low-a development tied to the rapid growth of higher education institutions in the United States. As a larger college-educated audience, often referred to as the professional-managerial class (PMC), emerged in the U.S., university English Departments elevated the aesthetic and ideological values of "highbrow" modernism, such as difficult prose and a suspicion of the institutions that had begun to dominate modern life. Meanwhile, cultural institutions outside the university, such as the Book of the Month Club, aimed to reach the same college-educated readers through a more accessible "middlebrow" literature, one that depicted a world where human individuality and agency were still possible within-and even assisted by-modern institutions. Focusing on four middlebrow novelists often dismissed within academic literary criticism (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Edna Ferber, and Ayn Rand), I consider how these authors' works embody crucial values-including likeability, leadership, self-help, progress, patriotism, exceptionalism, and utility-that matter to the PMC, but that academic literary criticisms often defines itself against. In each chapter, I attend to each author's formal techniques, in order to show that middlebrow novels can be aesthetically interesting and ambitious, despite modernist assumptions to the contrary; and I compare each middlebrow novelist to a more modernist, or highbrow, contemporary (Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren), in order to contrast the two genres, their values, and their places (or lack thereof) within the academic literary canon. Throughout this dissertation, I consider literary history in relation to educational and social theories that shared middlebrow literature's views of the world, such as those of John Dewey and other progressive educators. Ultimately, I argue that academic literary studies has undermined its own relevance by rejecting the middlebrow values that are important not only to the PMC more broadly, but also to the higher education institutions that academic literary criticism could not exist without.

ISBN: 9780549900092Subjects--Topical Terms:

2122720
American studies.

Useful fiction: Why universities need middlebrow literature.
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