/lit/ - Literature

Middlebrow just means a dilettante who worked to earn that level of appreciation/art at that level, midwit means dilettante no matter what you do (i.e. IQ)

>>13308668
"middlebrow"... you mean bourgeois?
I have never heard the term middlebrow.

middlebrow is nebulous and ill defined in a sense but still are useful conceptions.
if middlebrow doesn't exist then neither do highbrow nor lowbrow

To be truly highbrow / not "middlebrow" or a "midwit" you have to actually have read like the entire canon, speak another language or two, virtually no one lives up to this ideal

>>13308668
Just read what you like, and it will still be more than most people. Also, you will retain more info if you like it. Nobody really cares what books you read, except for pseuds who just want to feel better than you because they have nothing else going in their life.

>>13308668
I associate "middlebrow" with for instance murakami, salinger, hemingway, fitzgerald or marquez.

>>13308861
>virtually no one lives up to this ideal

>>13308876
EXTREMELY based post

>>13308876
Yup. Guaranteed if you just fathom a little further you'll find that your tastes are more specific, even naturally refined, than you knew.

Rene Guenon has a whole chapter in his book “Initiation and Spiritual Realization” on how middlebrow/midwits are the greatest evil society has ever known. I would read that, OP.

>>13309031
The number of people who've actually read the whole canon, genuinely understood all of it, and can fluently speak 2+ languages? A few thousand, maybe. Grossly outnumbered by people affecting that they're on that level

>>13308876
this

>>13309020
>salinger, hemingway, fitzgerald
Middlebrow must be synonymous with greatest novelists of all time.

>>13308668

I'll save you from reading some nutty Frenchman's polemic (>>13309063) and tell you that "highbrow" pursuits require some sort of intellectual initiation. Anything that can be understood without undergoing such an initiation is "lowbrow" if it has no pretensions to greater meaning and "middlebrow" if it does.

High culture and low culture has been blurred for ages. Rich people consume low culture just the same as poor people reading high literature or whatever

>>13309020
>salinger
>fitzgerald
those are some the greatest burgers writers

There's this.
pic related

>>13309069
Anyone who's Eurasian and not an Anglo can speak at least two languages.

>>13308668
Virginia Woolf writing while on the rag

Booth Tarkington

>>13308668
The distinction has always been blurry at best, but it is particularly obscure today because we have decadent elites (I mean comparatively, our elites are more decadent than the small bourgeoisie).

>>13308668
"pseud" is a middlebrow insult

Is something like Hamilton middlebrow?

>>13312158
Can you post this image again, this time not squished?

>>13308861
ahahahahah

Reminder that if you don't have a tall, prodigious forehead you're technically unable to be highbrow. Rounded foreheads that seem large because of a receeded hairline don't count; there must be a considerable verticality to it.

>>13313924

>>13313958
I am convinced that Kant wasn't actually human, but some sort of goblinoid sage.

>>13310036
Catcher in the Rye kind of sucks. If any roots of our modern problems can be identified, the publication of that book is likely one of them. Probably more damaging than On the Road.

>>13312158
Yeah, this was clearly written by a Post-War New Yorker. They were some of the first to really usher in an idea of high-class built not around any substance but around knowing which of the barely distinguishable abstract sounds and paintings you were supposed to like, transforming it from a game of skill and difficulty into a game of association and hedonism.

>>13313287
This is important to recognize it. Most people can't see it, because the aristocrats of prior generations were very visible and ostentatious. But today's elite cloud their decadence in irony. They spend absurd amount of money on things that have no value, which actually have negative value, which are harmful to them and society. They revel in being poor examples. They indulge in banality and laugh at a pantomime of charity. The decadence of our current upper-class is their complete lack of class, which they can survive only by privilege of wealth and status. And so despite their displays of brotherhood with the common and vulgar man, they are wealthier than ever, and society has become just as restrictive as Victorian England. Given the restraints on behavior and social mobility, which would you rather participate in?

>>13313981
>Catcher in the Rye is the only book that Salinger wrote
>It's worse in any way that On The Road
middlebrow pseud spotted

>>13314028
>implying any book Salinger wrote can make up for the damage of Catcher in the Rye
Catcher in the Rye is a popular book, because it expresses a feeling that almost all teenage boys feel. But if you find yourself going along with it, the novel only presents two ways of life, which almost all who read it adopt. The first is to follow Holden in his impotent desire to return to innocence; this is the peter pan lifestyle of onions and bugs--a suicidal misery masked by fantasy and drugs. The other option is the more rational, but far more destructive route, which comes by following Holden's thinking, rather than his actions; this is to lose faith in all social mores, distrust authority, mock everyone, and selfishly engage in the same behavior your criticize with the defense that it is ironic, or subversive, or some other nonsense. The second route leads to all the artists, musicians, and activists of the 60s and 70s who promoted degeneracy and revolution. The first route leads to the countless hordes of consumers who paid for it all. The worst of it is that by it's approachable prose, it has become standard reading in public in private schools for generations now. On the Road may have opened the door, but Catcher in the Rye took the door off its hinges.