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Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – October 11, 2011

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Dwight Macdonald (Author)
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Dwight Macdonald (Author), John Summers (Editor), Louis Menand (Introduction)
3.9 out of 5 stars 12 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Series: New York Review Books Classics
  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: NYRB Classics (October 11, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 159017447X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1590174470
  • Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.7 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #862,466 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 starsLargely an abridged repackaging
By Gordon Matthews on December 9, 2011
Format: Paperback
The title of this collection made me fear that it would simply be a repackaging of Macdonald's earlier collection, Against the American Grain (in which "Masscult and Midcult" is the lead essay), and to a large degree that's what it is. The last two essays did not appear in the original collection (both were, however, previously collected in the Macdonald collection Discriminations), but all the others did, and a number of the essays from the original collection have been deleted. I'm glad that at least part of that fine book has been brought back into print, but the selection of contents is baffling. Why not either reissue Against the American Grain in its original form or put together a collection of previously uncollected MacDonald pieces?
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5.0 out of 5 starsStill readable after all these years
By Dennis Littrell HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on February 8, 2012
Format: Paperback
(Note: I'm posting my review of the original book "Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture" from 1962 here because even though this book is an abridged version of the original most of it is the same.)

I recall "Against the American Grain" from my youth and recommend it to today's readers primarily for the first essay in the book, "Masscult & Midcult," which first appeared in Partisan Review in 1960. MacDonald, who was on the staff of the New Yorker magazine for many years, sees Masscult as "a parody of High Culture." He identifies "the enormous output of such new media as the radio, television and the movies" as "almost entirely Masscult." (p. 3) The idea is that the product which is fed to the masses is not art at all but instead a kind of ersatz denaturing of art similar to bleached white flour. "Masscult offers its customers neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience.... The production line grinds out a uniform product whose humble aim is not even entertainment...but merely distraction. It may be stimulating or narcotic, but it must be easy to assimilate." (pp. 4-5)

Curiously MacDonald was right in the same way that Marshall McLuhan was right in his Understanding Media (1964) in which he famously wrote that "the medium is the message" and in a later work, "the medium is the massage." Masscult massages the couch potato, deadens the critical faculties of the mass mind and renders the average person fit for compliance with the needs of the corporation and the power structure. MacDonald and McLuhan predicted the world of today some 45 years ago.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsMostly Insightful
By JAK on May 14, 2013
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
If you are interested in the literature, politics and history of the USA from the 1930's through the 1960's , you've probably heard of Dwight Macdonald. However, I suspect if you're under 70 you probably haven't read him. Well if you haven't, you are missing out on something. At his best Macdonald was a perceptive and very funny critic.The title essay here is probably his most famous work.Here he lays out the once well known theory of culture as divided into roughly four spheres.Once there was high culture and low or folk culture and that was it.The industrial age gives birth to mass culture and gradually midculture. Mid cult is the hardest to define.I would suggest it's mass cult with pretensions.This stratification of art has everything to do with - in Walter Benjamin's terminology- the rise of mechanical reproduction of art, sound and the image.(Macdonald cites Adorno but not Benjamin).How valid is any of this? As an analytical tool ,I think this type of categorization is useful, if you don't take it too literally.It can function as an antidote to the overdone tendency to blur high and low to such an extent that , there can be no high or low in analyzing art.Yes, distinguishing Bach from Beyonce does have to be done because if you don't , you're lost.On certain specific points Macdonald is simply wrong.To give a striking example, he sees jazz as a somewhat vital holdout from folk culture but dismisses rock as masscult.Well, yes and no.Rock had much deeper roots in both rural and urban folk culture than Macdonald understood.Also while he was still alive rock was rushing headlong in the direction of midcult and at times playing with highcult. Refreshingly,Macdonald is blithely dismissive of art as validated by noble sentiment or good intentions.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsClassic, funny, readable essays; superb introduction
By margot on February 17, 2014
Format: Kindle Edition
One of Dwight Macdonald's best books was his 1960 anthology, 'Parodies.' He had a sharp eye for humor, and as a critic and editor, a perfect sense of comic timing. Therefore most of these essays in "Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain" have at least one laugh-out-loud line. Some--at least the ones on Wolfe and Hemingway and the King James Bible--have a good laugh or two on every page.

The only deficiency in the collection is the long title essay itself...slightly sub-par Macdonald. Macdonald was aware of this, and so is Louis Menand, whose Introduction deftly explains why it was a disappointment. Menand's introduction may be the best thing in the book, if only because it's probably the best (only?) summation of Dwight Macdonald ever written.

Macdonald was good at the book review, and excelled at the critical riposte. Drawn-out critical theories and manifestoes were not his game. So the essay "Masscult and Midcult" is a readable, workmanlike statement of theory, but not much more. Macdonald was initially asked to write a whole book on the topic. Wisely, he chose not to, figuring that his 25,000-word essay pretty much exhausted both his own ideas and the readers' interest. (This is one respect in which he differs from Marshall McLuhan, the contemporary to whom he bears the closest parallel; McLuhan would gladly have filled 300 dense pages saying the same thing a hundred different ways.) Critic that he was, Macdonald couldn't help but see the holes and soft spots in his own argument. Still half-steeped in the enthusiasms of his youth, the Macdonald of the 1950s tended to fall back upon Marxist theory when trying to sort out a cultural phenomenon.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsThe classic. Learn to separate the junk from the ...

The classic. Learn to separate the junk from the genius?

Published 8 days ago by Howard F. Mandel
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

A great analysis of how American culture has declined through the attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Published 11 months ago by Arona K Henderson
3.0 out of 5 starsWhen High Culture Reigned

NYRB, the publisher of this and over 300 other volumes, has as its mission in life to reprint important books that are no longer in print. Read more

Published on June 5, 2012 by las cosas
4.0 out of 5 starsshaggy dog American word tortures

There was once a best selling novel by James Gould Cozzens called By Love Possessed. There had been many reviews before Dwight MacDonald wrote the essay that is included in the... Read more

Published on March 27, 2012 by Bruce P. Barten
2.0 out of 5 starsA few miscellaneous comments

I had a few comments on Macdonald's own opinions on modern culture since I see some obvious problems there. Read more

Published on February 21, 2012 by magellan
5.0 out of 5 starsY E S !

Great Dwight McDonald stuff -- the only critic, by the way, to review the massive OED, Oxford English Dictionary. [In the New Yorker]

Published on December 8, 2011 by Robert Conley
3.0 out of 5 starsAn Amusing, Snobbish Read

I first read Dwight Macdonald's title essay when it was new in the 60s. At the time it made quite an impression, because it made the reader feel like part of an intellectual... Read more

Published on November 20, 2011 by Michael Kohlhaas
2.0 out of 5 starsLet's do the Time Warp again, or Avant-Garde? So last year

Just as someone who calls the 'lower orders' plebs to their faces is a jumped-up oik of insecure social status (our recent Tory Chief Whip, a joyous episode) so the definition of... Read more

Published on October 25, 2011 by Simon Barrett 'Il Penseroso'

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