The ‘Escalation’ of L’il Abner

The devious ruminations of David Riesman long since should have warned us to expect the rise of a New Criticism of the popular arts, comparable, say, to I. A. Rdchards’ Practical Criticism if not quite in the vein of Ransom and Tate. Now it is here. If you like the panel discussion approach which is itself becoming one of the mass media, of course you will choose the Mass Culture volume edited by Messrs. Rosenberg and White. But you prefer one single, suave, quite concentrated dose, try The Astonished Muse, by Reuel Denney (University of Chicago, $4.50), and achieve some “escalation” (his term) in your pre-prandial session with the comic strips. (The title, if you don’t remember, comes from an ode by Emerson.)

Mr. Denney, erstwhile collaborator with Mr. Riesman in The Lonely Crowd, is a social scientist who can cite his Veblen or Freud with all the graceful assurance of an Ivy College graduate (Dartmouth), but he wears his sociological surveys with a difference, for he is also a poet (winner of Poetry’s Eunice Tietjens prize in 1954) and is just as much at home with Euripides, Donne, Poe, or Milton, as with Dixie Dugan or the Ed Sullivan show or a set of charts of audience response. He declared himself to be a “humanist critic” concerned as much with the art forms of mass media as with their social content and effect. His business in this volume is to explore and judge the aesthetics of movies, TV, comic books and strips, science fiction, football (“lyric sport,” to him), advertising-even functional architecture.

DD

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Donald Davidson

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The devious ruminations of David Riesman long since should have warned us to expect the rise of a New Criticism of the popular arts, comparable, say, to I. A. Rdchards’ Practical Criticism if not quite in the vein of Ransom and Tate. Now it is here. If you like the panel discussion approach which is itself becoming one of the mass media, of course you will choose the Mass Culture volume edited by Messrs. Rosenberg and White. But you prefer one single, suave, quite concentrated dose, try The Astonished Muse, by Reuel Denney (University of Chicago, $4.50), and achieve some “escalation” (his term) in your pre-prandial session with the comic strips. (The title, if you don’t remember, comes from an ode by Emerson.)

Mr. Denney, erstwhile collaborator with Mr. Riesman in The Lonely Crowd, is a social scientist who can cite his Veblen or Freud with all the graceful assurance of an Ivy College graduate (Dartmouth), but he wears his sociological surveys with a difference, for he is also a poet (winner of Poetry’s Eunice Tietjens prize in 1954) and is just as much at home with Euripides, Donne, Poe, or Milton, as with Dixie Dugan or the Ed Sullivan show or a set of charts of audience response. He declared himself to be a “humanist critic” concerned as much with the art forms of mass media as with their social content and effect. His business in this volume is to explore and judge the aesthetics of movies, TV, comic books and strips, science fiction, football (“lyric sport,” to him), advertising-even functional architecture.