released 9/20/2024

Today’s Friday Feature presents two archived interviews from Volume 42 (2000) of the Journal. Michael Kammen, author of American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change in the 20th Century, discusses the difference between popular and mass culture. He establishes their differences in scale (both quantitatively and qualitatively), skill, and participation levels. Kammen gives examples of the bonding function of popular culture at the community level. Then, Philip Fisher, author of Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction, defines culture as passing down tradition from one generation to the next. He then analyzes Ralph Waldo Emerson who, unlike many thinkers, thought new culture would inevitably erase the older form of culture. (He used the metaphor of a bigger circle drawn around a smaller circle: new culture dissolves old culture.) Fisher projects the consequences of this kind of thinking: painting, for example, will be abolished with the advent of film. In conclusion, Fisher examines the effects of this nineteeth-century American thinking on our modern society.

26 minutes

PREVIEW

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