October 9

6:30pm-8pm

Sage 3303

The contemporary aesthetic judgement of “mid” articulates the disappearance of midbudget cinema, midlist fiction, and the middlebrow as such.  Amid a historic decline of the middle class caused in part by the “missing middle” housing crisis, Anna Kornbluh (Professor of English, University of Illinois - Chicago) argues that cultural study must revamp its traditional sociological methods. Briefly considering architecture, photography, fiction, and television, this talk experiments with a formalist approach to mid aesthetics: "good enough art.”