Highbrow

Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, "highbrow" is synonymous 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 teaches that people with large foreheads are more intelligent. The term is deeply connected to hierarchical racial theories from the 19th century. The German physician, physiologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) argued "for human diversity alonglines of racial differences as evidenced by skulls shapes and measurements. ..One metric of Blumenbachs classification was the line of the forehead, said to be higher among ' Caucasians' and lower among 'Mongolians' and ' Ethiopians' and this is the origin of the still common usage of 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' ".

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 arthouse 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; 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". 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

Lowbrow 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". 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 genres of 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

References

*{{cite journal , first1=Richard A. , last1=Peterson , author-link=Richard A. Peterson (sociologist) , first2=Roger M. , last2=Kern , title=Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore , journal=American Sociological Review , volume=61 , issue=5 , year=1996 , pages=900–907 , doi=10.2307/2096460 , jstor=2096460 Extensive bibliography.

Further reading

* Arnold, Matthew. ''Culture and Anarchy''.
* Eliot, T.S. ''Notes Towards the Definition of Culture'' (New York: Harcourt Brace) 1949.
* 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.
* Levine, Lawrence W. ''Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America'' (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press) 1988.
* Lynes, Russell. ''The Tastemakers'' (New York: Harper and Row) 1954.
* Radway, Janice A. ''Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire''.
* Rubin, Joan Shelley. ''The Making of Middle-Brow Culture'' (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) 1992.
* Swirski, Peter. ''From Lowbrow to Nobrow''. Montreal, London: McGill-Queen's University Press 2005
* Woolf, Virginia
''Middlebrow''
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1870s neologisms
Culture
High society (social class)
Social class subcultures
Intellectualism