[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Investigating the Middlebrow (UK) (11/24/06; 6/23/07)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Investigating the Middlebrow
One-Day Conference, Sheffield Hallam University, 23rd June 2007

middlebrow, n. and a.
colloq. Freq. derogatory.


According to the OED, the term ‘middlebrow’ first made an appearance in
1925, in Punch: ‘it consists of people who are hoping that some day they
will get used to the stuff that they ought to like.’ Perhaps so, but
while considering the stuff they ought to like, that controversial
figure, the general reader, was buying what it did like, creating
best-sellers of novelists as diverse as Elizabeth von Arnim, Warwick
Deeping, Winifred Holtby, J.B. Priestley, and Stella Gibbons. These
widely-read novelists, contentiously labelled ‘middlebrow’, have
received very little critical attention, and today the ‘middlebrow’
continues to be used to mark particular types of popular literature as
unchallenging and of little cultural or intellectual value.

What does it mean to be labelled ‘middlebrow’? Is it a question of
readership? Q.D. Leavis explicitly identified the growth of the
‘middlebrow’ as an unfortunate consequence of women forming the majority
of library users; while 50 years later Bourdieu argued that ‘middlebrow’
culture, in its eternally reverential relationship to ‘legitimate
culture’, was illegitimate simply because it was the taste of the
middle-class, not because of any intrinsic qualities.

This conference invites papers on any aspect of the middlebrow. Topics
could include:
·	the pleasures of reading
·	the role of sentiment
·	historicizing the middlebrow
·	the gender of modernism
·	taxonomies of taste
·	cultural capital


We particularly welcome papers focussing on analyses of little-studied
middlebrow novels, films, novelists or film-makers.

Proposals of 400 words for 20-minute papers should be sent via email to
Erica Brown and Mary Grover at middlebrow at hotmail.co.uk by 24th November
2006.




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