A Middle Road Between Sterility and Stupefaction/part two

The indispensable essays for the teacher of literature in Mass Culture are "Who Reads What Books and Why?"; "The Book Business in America"; "Mickey Spillane and His Bloody Hammer"; "Values in Mass Periodical Fiction, 1921-1940"; "Majority and Minority Americans"; "The Creator-Audience Relationship in the Mass Media"; "American Advertising"; and "Broadway and the Flight from American Reality." An important critic of popular culture unaccountably missing from this anthology is Reuel Denney, who has redressed the mistake in editorial judgment by publishing an entire book on the subject this past summer.

The Astonished Muse (University of Chicago Press, $4.50) is essentially an analysis of the new "esthetics of abundance." It is a warning to Americans entering the new leisure frontier not to let their imaginations atrophy. Denney has a wide ranging vision, and he examines the effects of rising income standards on American play in a much broader perspective than Mass Culture. Denney considers hot rodding, advertising, town planning and architecture, science fiction, as well as the standard media.

A special value of this book for English teachers derives from the fact that Denney, being both a professional sociologist and a publishing poet, can afford to talk turkey about the humanists' snide abdication of responsibility for an adequate criticism of popular culture.

"Following the fashion," Denney observes, "many literary and scholarly citizens of the United States mechanically snub the mass media. The obvious retort to dogmatically disdainful critics is that they ought not to complain about a popular culture for which they will take no responsibility." That shoe fits--and pinches. A final example justifying my contention that a liberal arts training is highly negotiable in criticism of the popular arts is Walter Goodman's The Clowns of Commerce (Sagamore Press, 1957, $4.95). Goodman is an editor for Redbook, a position that puts him close to the Madison Avenue melee he satirizes.

Goodman's concept of advertising is a broad and persuasive one. Side by side with trenchant critiques of shady strategies for peddling toothpaste, lipstick, automobiles, cigarettes, drugs, green stamps, slenderizing salons, there are thoughtful discussions of Billy Graham, Senator McCarthy, the society columns, and motivation research. Goodman's method is simple and effective (a natural, by the way, for classroom criticism).

He still believes firmly in the tradition of Western humanism, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence--in short, all those values which our society officially supports. He simply (but not simplemindedly) reveals the disparity between pretention and performance, between professed allegiance to these values and subversive support of contradictory ones.

For one thoughtful English teacher's suggestions for using the approach of a Goodman in the high school and college classroom, see Gonzaga's John Sisk's "Freud in Gray Flannel," America (August 10, 1957). There is a growing tradition, then, of people who can be concerned about mass culture's threats to the private person without throwing overboard their commitment to traditional literature and values. They lead a middle way for the English teacher interested in neither sterility nor stupefaction.