High Culture and / versus Popular Culture

This volume brings together papers given at the 18th British Cultural Studies Conference, held in Salzburg in 2007. As the title 'High Culture and / versus Popular Culture' suggests, it addresses an unsettled issue. On the one hand, it recalls the dissatisfaction with the distinction between high culture and popular culture characteristic of both post-fifties debates, which resulted in a complete re-orientation in cultural criticism, and of more recent suggestions of the 'collapse of boundaries'. On the other hand, it calls attention to the many ways in which this distinction still makes sense, as has been argued in defence of cultural pluralism. Dealing with literature, music, the theatre, film and television, the papers collected in this volume address the following questions: Does high culture 'borrow' from popular culture? Or vice versa? What kinds of transformation or adaptation between the cultural hierarchies are involved? Why, when and how do the relationships between high and popular culture change, either within a single cultural phenomenon or among different ones? What do such changes mean in terms of taste, class and gender as well as in terms of genre, form, and language? If high and pop are more conveniently considered as working terms rather than as having any essentialist connotations, who categorizes cultural products as 'high' or 'low' or 'popular'? Who is interested in such distinctions? Who negotiates these terms - 'high', 'pop', 'low', 'high-pop' - between a work of art, the artist / producer, and the recipient / consumer?