Maher makes fun of Bpat, I mean comic book fans

[Dill]

(11-20-2018, 12:37 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Was hoping this would be stated. I'm not a big comics reader. I have read some graphic series such as Sandman, Preacher, and some others, often graphic adaptations from novels I read. I've never been a "capes and tights" reader, but I've always known that there was a greater literary value in them than many critics of the medium tend to see. This is absolutely something that is seen throughout the ages where contemporary literature is often undervalued at the time. Chaucer and Shakespeare were both criticized heavily in their time, yet they have played a huge role in shaping English. Granted, there wasn't the distinction between high and low culture at the time and I'm not saying comic books are on the same level as Shakespeare, but the point is that what we see as low-brow can definitely have a hefty literary value.

There is always a distinction between high and low culture in every civilization.  However, this distinction changes over time as modes of artistic production and audiences change. E.g. painting was not "high art" in 13th century; photography and film were not considered art in the first decade of the 20th century, now they can be, and very hight art at that.

In Shakespeare's time, the high culture in London was written and read in Latin, followed by "courtly" poetry in English.  Shakespeare's Sonnets appear to have been his attempt to gain repute as a writer. His plays were not in the running because they were, well, plays written in English for "entertainment," and to keep the pot boiling.  Low brow for Early 17th-century England.  Some of those plays became high culture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as both drama and publishing flourished for a now large middle class audience. Shakespeare, along with other figures like Cervantes, Dante and Rabelais became high culture for Western Europe in the early 19th century--"world literature" as literay scholars/critics at the time put it, even as the critics were complaining at how far downhill poetry had gone down hill when reviewing the upstart Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.  When European countries began building modern universities and public school systems in the mid-19th century, each created a national canon of high brow literature in the vernacular to help bind the nation with a common culture.  That's why we still read a bit of Shakespeare in public schools.