Additional Study Questions for Levine, "Highbrow/Lowbrow"

towards Session 3, Wednesday 26 September 2007

Chapter 3

1. Faced with industrialization and increasing cultural diversity, how did America’s cultural elites respond at the end of the 19^th century?

2. How might one characterize 19^th-century audiences? To what extent did arbiters of culture attempt to modify audiences’ behavior, and succeed?

3. What unintended consequences did more docile audiences create?

4. To what ends did 19^th-century champions of culture maintain and disseminate pure culture?

5. How did the Columbian Exposition’s Midway Plaisance and White City symbolize a growing gulf in American culture?

6. How was American culture perceived to compare with European examples?

7. What racial and cultural dimensions did the ideology of culture assume?

8. How did Matthew Arnold contribute to our understanding of Culture?

9. How did our invented notions of culture conflict with reality?

10. As cultural categories codified, how were new forms of expressive culture characterized? With what results?

Epilogue

1. What reactions have been provoked by the growth of cultural pluralism in the late 20^th century?
2. What is the logical fallacy of the cultural categories that we embrace?