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Carnival Culture
The Trashing of Taste in America
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Book Presentation:
This study examines how the changes in publishing, movie making and television programming since the 1960s have affected taste, particularly what is considered vulgar. Show businesss, the industry of American culture, wreaks the most havoc on American taste by pandering to what most paying customers want to see. Twitchell's expose comes not to celebrate popular or carnival culture, as much as to answer questions about it: is vulgarity the result of repression or of freedom?; what is the relationship between machine-made entertainments and aesthetic values?; does television carnivalize or exalt cultural norms?; why do certain stories get told, and why do certain stories get told too often?; why are some of the most consistently profitable industries in the world those that transport audio and visual sequences we claim we can do without?; and why are today's A movies really yesterday's B movies dressed up with $50 million budgets?
About the Author:
James B. Twitchell teaches English and advertising at the University of Florida in Gainesville. His many books include Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture and Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism, both published by Columbia.
Press Reviews:
[Twitchell cites] numerous examples of crassness, inanity and sheer disregard for the idea of quality in publishing, television, and the movies.... A veritable catalogue of vulgarity. New York Times Book Review
Vividly dissects American entertainment. Newsweek
More horrifying than anything Stephen King could concoct. San Francisco Chronicle
Twitchell is on to something when he argues that democracy has canonized a new culture as, driven by the will of the majority, books have given ways to movies, which in turn have been usurped by TV in a canon he describes as 'carnival culture.'... Twitchell shows that the mass media, a forum for our common concerns and anxieties, have made possible the ascent of the tastes of the young and the unsophisticated to cultural dominance. Publishers Weekly
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
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