Paraculture  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 07:26, 17 April 2014

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Paraculture is an early 21st century neologism analogous to the nobrow concept.

Since both paraliterature and paracinema seem to be about the appreciation by intellectuals of low culture in cinema and literature, paraculture straddles high culture and low culture and is a basic tenet of the nobrow concept.

Rosalind E. Krauss coined the term paraliterary and Jameson the term paraliterature. However, they used it to denote different concepts. With paraliterary, Krauss denotes postmodern literary criticism by Barthes, Derrida and other French theorists. With paraliterature, Jameson denotes literature that became popular when postmodernism dissolved the borders between high and low literature.

Quoting from Krauss:

"If one of the tenets of modernist literature had been the creation of a work that would force reflection on the conditions of its own construction, that would insist on reading as a much more consciously critical act, then it is not surprising that the medium of a postmodernist literature should be the critical text wrought into a paraliterary form. And what is clear is that Barthes and Derrida are the writers, not the critics, that students now read." --Rosalind Krauss (1980, 40) quoted in Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1980) - Linda Hutcheon

Quoting from Jameson:

The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply “quote” as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance. --Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , Fredric Jameson, 1984