Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, " highbrow" is with intellectual; as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture. The term, first recorded in 1875, draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, which claims people with large foreheads are more intelligent.
Applications
"Highbrow" can be applied to
music, implying most of the classical music tradition; to literature—i.e.,
literary fiction and
poetry; to films in the
art film line; and to comedy that requires significant understanding of
analogies or references to appreciate. The term
highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discerning or selective;
[Lawrence W. Levine, "Prologue", Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, 1990: 3] and
highbrow is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres—opera and classical".
[Tak Wing Chan, Social Status and Cultural Consumption 2010: 60] The first usage in print of
highbrow was recorded in 1884.
The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter for
The Sun of New York City, who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads.
Variants
low culture is the opposite of
highbrow, and between those brows is the
middlebrow, which term describes the mediocre culture that has neither high expectations nor low expectations as culture. Usage of the term
middlebrow is derogatory, as in
Virginia Woolf's unsent letter to the
New Statesman, written in the 1930s and published in
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the word
middlebrow first appeared in print in 1925, in
Punch: "The
BBC claims to have discovered a new type—'the middlebrow'. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like".
[Quoted in Micki McGee, Yaddo: Making American Culture, 106: McGee outlines the history of the highbrow/lowbrow debate.] The term had previously appeared in hyphenated form in
The Nation, on 25 January 1912:
In spite of their wide-reaching differences, Virginia Woolf describes the highbrow as intimately reliant on the lowbrow. For instance, she considers Prince Hamlet to be a highbrow lacking orientation in the world once he had lost the lowbrow Ophelia with her grip on earthly realities: this, she thought, explained why in general highbrows "honour so wholeheartedly and depend so completely upon those who are called lowbrows".[A. Fox, Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissnce (1990) p. 107]
It was popularized by the American writer and poet Margaret Widdemer, whose essay "Message and Middlebrow" appeared in the Review of Literature in 1933. The three genre fiction, as American readers approached them in the 1950s and as obscenity law differentially judged them, are the subject of Ruth Pirsig Wood, Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow Novels, 1995.
See also
Notes
Further reading
-
Matthew Arnold. Culture and Anarchy.
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Eliot, T.S. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace) 1949.
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Lamont, Michèle and Marcel Fournier, editors. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1992. Includes Peter A. Richardson and Allen Simkus, "How musical taste groups mark occupational status groups" pp 152–68.
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Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press) 1988.
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Russell Lynes. The Tastemakers (New York: Harper and Row) 1954.
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Radway, Janice A. Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire.
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Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middle-Brow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) 1992.
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Peter Swirski. From Lowbrow to Nobrow. Montreal, London: McGill-Queen's University Press 2005
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Virginia Woolf. Middlebrow, in The Death of the Moth and other essays.
