Book Review

Anyone who has read in the vast literature on the transformation of Western culture in the twentieth century has confronted the array of bewildering and often contradictory terms that historians, sociologists, cultural critics, and theorists have devised to carve up their subject. Despite the presence of large-scale systems of cultural production and distribution for over a hundred years, commentators have not been able to agree on a set of categories of analysis. Michael Kammen's American Culture, American Tastes is an effort to do exactly that and, in the process, give the study of twentieth-century cultural change greater historical depth and precision. Intended as "an extended essay," and not a work of original research, Kammen's book relies heavily on recent books by scholars in cultural history and cultural studies in order to untangle the historical relationship between "popular culture" and "mass culture." Readers who know that work will find much that is familiar here, although they will no doubt discover a few surprises in the illustrative examples ("factoids," as CNN might call them) that Kammen sprinkles along the way: the triumph of the soap opera as an afternoon genre on all three television networks in 1954, for example, or the coining of the term "couch potato" by the cartoonist Robert Armstrong in 1976.

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Kammen's main interest is in the periodization of cultural change in the twentieth century, a project that he approaches on two fronts: the history of taste stratification and the periodization of a shift from "popular" to "mass" culture. In examining hierarchies of taste, Kammen sketches out a chronology that roughly resembles Lawrence Levine's argument in Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988) that the Jacksonian era's stylistic hybridity and mixed audiences for performative culture gave way to a more stratified conception of "high" and "low" in elite circles by the end of the nineteenth century. And, much like Levine, Kammen notes the collapse of the turn-of-the-century cultural hierarchy constructed by genteel patricians in the heterogeneous postmodern culture of our own time.

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