Highbrow

Philip Melanchthon,engraving byAlbrecht Dürer,1526

Used colloquially as anounoradjective,"highbrow"issynonymouswithintellectual;as an adjective, it also meanselite,and generally carries aconnotationofhigh culture.The term, first recorded in 1875, draws itsmetonymyfrom thepseudoscienceofphrenology,which teaches that people with large foreheads are more intelligent.^[1]The term is deeply connected tohierarchical racial theoriesfrom the 19th century. The German physician,physiologist,andanthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach(1752–1840) argued "for human diversity alonglines of racial differences as evidenced by skulls shapes and measurements. [...] One metric of Blumenbachs classification was the line of the forehead, said to be higher among 'Caucasians' and lower among 'Mongolians' and 'Ethiopians' and this is the origin of the still common usage of 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' ".^[2]

Applications

"Highbrow" can be applied tomusic,implying most of theclassical musictradition; to literature—i.e.,literary fictionandpoetry;to films in thearthouseline; and to comedy that requires significant understanding ofanalogiesor references to appreciate. The termhighbrowis considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discerning or selective;^[3]andhighbrowis currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres—opera and classical".^[4]The first usage in print ofhighbrowwas recorded in 1884.^[5]The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter forThe Sunof New York City, who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads.^[6]

Variants

Lowbrowis the opposite ofhighbrow,and between those brows is themiddlebrow,which term describes the mediocre culture that has neither high expectations nor low expectations as culture. Usage of the termmiddlebrowis derogatory, as inVirginia Woolf's unsent letter to theNew Statesman,written in the 1930s and published inThe Death of the Moth and Other Essays(1942). According to theOxford English Dictionary,the wordmiddlebrowfirst appeared in print in 1925, inPunch:"TheBBCclaims to have discovered a new type—'the middlebrow'. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like ".^[7]The term had previously appeared in hyphenated form inThe Nation,on 25 January 1912:

[T]here is an alarmingly wide chasm, I might almost say a vacuum, between the high-brow, who considers reading either as a trade or as a form of intellectual wrestling, and the low-brow, who is merely seeking for gross thrills. It is to be hoped that culture will soon be democratized through some lessconventionalsystem of education, giving rise to a new type that might be called the middle-brow, who will consider books as a source of intellectual enjoyment.

In spite of their wide-reaching differences,Virginia Woolfdescribes the highbrow as intimately reliant on the lowbrow. For instance, she considersPrince Hamletto be a highbrow lacking orientation in the world once he had lost the lowbrowOpheliawith her grip on earthly realities: this, she thought, explained why in general highbrows "honour so wholeheartedly and depend so completely upon those who are called lowbrows".^[8]

It was popularized by the American writer and poetMargaret Widdemer,whose essay "Message and Middlebrow" appeared in theReview of Literaturein 1933. The threegenres of fiction,as American readers approached them in the 1950s and as obscenity law differentially judged them, are the subject of Ruth Pirsig Wood,Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow Novels,1995.^{[citation needed]}

Notes

^Hendrickson, Robert (1997).Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins.New York: Facts on File.ISBN 9780965379458.Dr.Franz Joseph Gall(1758–1828), founder of the 'science' ofphrenology,gave support to the old folk notion that people with big foreheads have more brains. The theory, later discredited, led to the expression 'highbrow' for anintellectual,which is first recorded in 1875.
^Tchen, John Kuo Wei; Yeats, Dylan, eds. (2014).Yellow peril! an archive of anti-Asian fear(1. publ ed.). London: Verso. p. 130.ISBN 978-1-78168-124-4.
^Lawrence W. Levine, "Prologue",Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America,1990: 3
^Tak Wing Chan,Social Status and Cultural Consumption2010: 60
^"Highbrow".Oxford English Dictionary(Online ed.).Oxford University Press.(Subscription orparticipating institution membershiprequired.)
^Hendrickson, Robert (1997).Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins.New York: Facts on File.ISBN 9780965379458.New York Sun reporter Will Irvin popularized 'highbrow,' and its opposite 'lowbrow' in 1902, basing his creation on the wrongful notion that people with high foreheads have bigger brains and are more intelligent andintellectualthan those with low foreheads. At first the term was complimentary, but 'Tristi' came to be at best a neutral word.)
^Quoted in Micki McGee,Yaddo: Making American Culture,106: McGee outlines the history of the highbrow/lowbrow debate.
^A. Fox,Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissnce(1990) p. 107

References

Peterson, Richard A.;Kern, Roger M. (1996). "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore".American Sociological Review.61(5): 900–907.doi:10.2307/2096460.JSTOR 2096460.Extensive bibliography.

Highbrow

Applications

Variants

See also

Notes

References

Further reading