Is High Culture Possible?

Maria Polski, East-West Univ.

mariap@eastwest.edu

Talk 1

Dr. Lawrence Gorman.

Director, English and Communications Program

East-West Unversity, Chicago, IL.

Postmodernism and Syncretism: Deconstructing High Culture

High culture in the traditional sense is presently impossible.  The classical curriculum, which traces its origin back to Homer and represents to us the best that has been written, drawn, or sculpted, has dissipated itself.  Its ideals no longer have the power to shape selves.

Postmodern art is syncretic. It does not oppose itself to the popular.  It does not refine it.  It mixes it up.  High culture was disciplinary.  It was meant to shape the personality.  It presumed cultural authority that could prescribe.  This authority has degenerated into the Bennetts, Cheneys, and Rumsfelds. The postmodern personality is undisciplined; it is tempted towards narcissism and flatness. It is engulfed in cultural garbage, and in many ways high culture is another garbage layer. What makes postmodern art exciting is its promise of discovery and renewal. It does this in part by finding in the garbage the materials for shaping a new personality.

Talk 2

Dr. Ellen McManus

Assistant Professor of English

Dominical University, Chicago, IL

Teaching Literature to the Animaniacs Generation

Cartoons have always been one of the most postmodern of arts, particularly specializing in low culture spoofing of high culture.  Students now entering college grew up on this postmodern art taken to a new level.  In the mid-90s cartoon show Animaniacs, this generation was treated to steady stream of affectionate and hilarious parodies of high culture, low culture, and everything in between.  Bugs Bunny singing Wagner and the sophisticated in-jokes of Rocky and Bullwinkle still recognize and even celebrate the high/low division, but Animaniacs mixed, matched, and parodied everything from classic high culture and beat poetry to movies and television.  Any kid who watched TV between 1993 and 1998 has likely been infected with Animaniacs’ postmodern esthetic and is probably also equipped with the kind of thumbnail cultural literacy that E.D. Hirsch was advocating at the time.  These kids are now our literature students, and this paper explores how we might best take into account the peculiar strengths and limitations that they bring to our classrooms.

Talk 3

Dr. Maria V. Polski

Assistant Professor of English

East-West University Chicago, IL

The Law Of Non-Destruction And Accumulation Of Culture by Yuri Rozhdestvensky

Yuri Rozhdestvensky (1927-1999, Moscow, Russia) defines culture as an accumulation of rules and precedents – a set of human achievements valid for future generations as examples of best practices. In this sense there can be no “high” or “low”: the results of daily human exploits either in the long run sink into oblivion or become part of culture. Experience shows that in aesthetic part of spiritual culture artifacts that sink into oblivion usually do not aim at stimulating an aesthetic emotion. They aim primarily below the belt and at developing physiological emotions, as opposed to artifacts that remain and become part of culture. However, since we appreciate beauty and propriety only when they are spiced up by episodes of distortion, it would be senseless to exclude “low” from culture.

Rozhdestvensky’s law of accumulation and non-destruction of culture says that with the arrival of new artifacts (new cultural strata) the old strata do not disappear – they become integrated in the new system. It follows that 1) neglecting best practices and achievements of the past is vandalism – destruction of culture; 2) new achievements of human spirit look for their place among previous ones. It is the task of teachers to prevent unintentional vandalism and help students to combine the old and the new.