Approaches to Popular Culture by C. W. E. Bigsby (review)

APPROACHES TO POPULAR CULTURE BY C. W. E. BIGSBY (Bowling Green University Popular Press - Bowling Green, Ohio, 43403) This work is both a challenge and a teaser in that it deals with two fashionable and general notions: popular, and culture. As the editor announces in his preface, popular culture is here envisaged as a product for consumption, hence the need to investigate "the psychology of those at whom it is directed" (viii). The first section, Perspectives, gathers seven theoretical essays from various disciplines (Sociology, History, Linguistics etc.) and is followed by six analytical illustrations. Z. Barbu, in "Popular Culture: A Sociological Approach," notes that recent tendencies in the field emphasize an empirical type of inquiry and a purely negative appraisal. But 'popular' does not mean 'popularized', and popularity is not "an objective-quantitative phenomenon" (57). Secondly, 'popular' is not synonymous with 'populist', and the "differentiation between a 'high' and 'low', a majority (class), and a minority (elitic) culture" (43) should be eliminated (He is in obvious disagreement with D. Craig's "Marxism and Popular Culture"). Barbu also proposes a diachronical consideration of the transition from a preliterate to a literate stage, from a dominantly oral to a dominantly written culture (See P. Burke's article on the instructive distortions in the written transmission of an oral creation, and S. Hood's analysis of the "Dilemma of the Communicators"). One of Barbu's most interesting clarifications concerns the historical continuity of popular culture as an active "function and structure of creative imagination" (67). Elaborating on this point, G. R. Kress posits that popular culture is transitive; the ideological myth is completely lost at the realization stage, and the affected participant cannot influence the structure imposed on him by the generative producer. R. Hodge refines this view by showing that popular culture uses both transitive and intransitive codes: cultural deprivation occurs only when popular culture perpetuates obsolete metaphysics. The achievement of the present volume is to define and describe popular culture as an act, if not an art, of communication. BRIGITTE CAZELLES» ?BRIGITTE CAZELLES has written several articles dealing with didactic, religious medieval literature. She is the author of La Faiblesse chez Gautier de Coinci (Stanford French Studies, 1978), and co-author of Le Vain Siècle Guerpir: A Literary Approach to Sainthood Through Old French Hagiography of the Twelfth Century (North Carolina Press, 1979). 152VOL 34. NO 2(SPRING 1980) ...