Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America [Hardcover]

James B. Twitchell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1992

This study examines how the changes in publishing, movie making and television programming since the 1960s have affected taste, particularly what is considered vulgar. Show businesss, the industry of American culture, wreaks the most havoc on American taste by pandering to what most paying customers want to see. Twitchell's expose comes not to celebrate popular or "carnival" culture, as much as to answer questions about it: is vulgarity the result of repression or of freedom?; what is the relationship between machine-made entertainments and aesthetic values?; does television carnivalize or exalt cultural norms?; why do certain stories get told, and why do certain stories get told too often?; why are some of the most consistently profitable industries in the world those that transport audio and visual sequences we claim we can do without?; and why are today's "A" movies really yesterday's "B" movies dressed up with $50 million budgets? James Twitchell's book examines the current popularity of the "high take on the low culture" among academics, the contemporary view of taste as oppressive, and the reluctance to admit that something is in bad taste.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

YA-- Are the three great purveyors of mass culture in the U. S.--book publishing, motion pictures, and television--creating a culture that glorifies the vulgar and the mediocre at the expense of worthwhile qualities in American life? According to the author of this often humorous and sarcastic but cogently reasoned book, the answer, unfortunately, is ``Yes.'' Surveying a vast wasteland of American pop culture through a trail of such icons as professional wrestling, Madonna, Stephen King novels, and ``America's Funniest Home Videos,'' Twitchell believes that the media has raised the ``low-brow'' to a level of respectability that excludes what used to be high brow from American life. This is a provocative book that should get the attention of YA readers, who are, the author maintains, the major target and biggest fans of the new ``trash'' culture.
- Richard Lisker, Fairfax County Public Library, Fairfax,
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

[Twitchell cites] numerous examples of crassness, inanity and sheer disregard for the idea of quality in publishing, television, and the movies.... A veritable catalogue of vulgarity.

(New York Times Book Review )

Vividly dissects American entertainment.

(Newsweek )

More horrifying than anything Stephen King could concoct.

(San Francisco Chronicle )

Twitchell is on to something when he argues that democracy has canonized a new culture as, driven by the will of the majority, books have given ways to movies, which in turn have been usurped by TV in a canon he describes as 'carnival culture.'... Twitchell shows that the mass media, a forum for our common concerns and anxieties, have made possible the ascent of the tastes of the young and the unsophisticated to cultural dominance.

(Publishers Weekly ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 306 pages
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr (July 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231078307
• ISBN-13: 978-0231078306
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,922,898 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a garage sale, dig through the crap to find the good stuff, March 21, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Houston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America (Paperback)

This text was required for a course in Mass Media and Culture. I have read many books on this very topic and find that Twitchell has some good things to offer to the discussion. However, it is horribly written. The writing is reminiscent of a college sophmore's english term paper. The chapters are long and grossly unorganized. He repeats his points, is unjudicious in the selection of his quotes, and includes superflous examples from the media with little to no connection. In short, this is an ideal example of how NOT to write.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars And Your Point Is . . .?, April 22, 2004

By 

Edward Garea "Edward Garea" (Branchville, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America (Hardcover)

Given the provocative title, I expected to find a full-blown critique of the state of our current culture and just how it got that way. Was I ever wrong: the book was overblown and there was no critique. Nor was there a defense of today's culture. While the book was good at explaining today's culture and its history (particularly the development of the paperback book), there is no follow-up. As one earlier reviewer perceptively noted, it's as if the author was merely writing a term paper. And nowhere is this more evident than in his description of professional wrestling, which he seems to have researched solely on his television set. As if to provide a bit of validity to this exposition, he includes a lengthy quote from Rolaand Barthes' essay on wrestling. Nice, except that Barthes doesn't know what he's talking about, either, and something I would expect from a term paper, not a book. The sections on wrestling and movies only serve to date the book rather badly, and without any sort of conclusions or judgments, the book dates as badly as an issue of Life magazine, only it lacks any nostalgia value. Skip this one and read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death instead (which, by the way, the author does critique; dismissing it as a mere jeremiad.) If you must buy this tome, buy it on the cheap; your disappointment will then be less.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read for Pop Culture Aficionados, September 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America (Paperback)

This is a fantastic book for those interested in the forgotten, often-belittled world of mainstream popular culture. Although at times Twitchell seems to have a negative take on the world of Stephen King, the WWF, and Barnum himself, I found this world fascinating, even, strangely, inspiring.