The recent surge of “mid” as an aesthetic judgment paradoxically discloses the missing middle in contemporary cultural arts: a decline of midbudget cinema, midlist fiction, and other just fine commodity aesthetic forms. Amid a historic eviction of the middle class, cultural study of the middlebrow can no longer rely upon the traditional sociological method. Briefly considering architecture, photography, fiction, and television, this talk experiments with a formalist approach to “good enough” art.

Anna Kornbluh's research and teaching interests center on the novel, film, and cultural aesthetics in theoretical perspective, including formalist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic approaches. She is the author of several books and essays and is a member of the UIC United Faculty bargaining team, on the editorial boards of Novel, Mediations, Genre, and Parapraxis, and is the founding facilitator of The Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory and a partner in HumanitiesWorks.org.

Sponsored by the Division of Literature & Languages. Free and open to the public.