Twitchell's Carnival Culture and the Decline of Publishing
This paper analyzes James Twitchell's argument in Carnival Culture that the American publishing industry has abandoned its role as a cultural guide in favor of profit-driven commercialism. Drawing on Chapter Two of Twitchell's book, the paper examines how books have become commodity products — "plasma points" in a sea of competing entertainment — and whether that transformation represents a genuine cultural decline. The paper also challenges aspects of Twitchell's thesis by noting that popular works can carry literary and intellectual value, and that mass publishing has historically served democratic purposes, as demonstrated by works like The Federalist Papers.
- Introduction: What's on Your Bookshelf?: Calvin and Hobbes versus Leviathan frames the argument
- Twitchell's Critique of Commercial Publishing: Publishing has shifted from merit to profit
- Books as Commodity: The Bestseller Culture: Books sold as artifacts, not read
- Challenging the High-Culture Argument: Bestsellers can carry genuine cultural value
- The Democratic Value of Mass Publishing: Mass printing enabled important democratic texts
- Conclusion: Can Popular and Literary Coexist?: Popular and literary reading can complement each other
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What makes this paper effective
- The opening hook — the Calvin and Hobbes versus Leviathan contrast — immediately grounds an abstract cultural argument in a concrete, relatable image that draws readers in.
- The paper does not simply summarize Twitchell; it engages critically, pushing back on his high-culture elitism with counterexamples like The Federalist Papers and Calvin and Hobbes' own intellectual depth.
- The tone is appropriately balanced: it acknowledges the validity of Twitchell's concerns about commodification while resisting a wholesale endorsement of his cultural gatekeeping position.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates critical engagement with a primary source text. Rather than restating Twitchell's argument, the writer tests it against examples — celebrity biographies, diet books, Danielle Steel, Tom Wolfe — to distinguish where the critique holds and where it oversimplifies. This use of counterexample to qualify a thesis is a fundamental technique in analytical writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a vivid comparative image, moves into a summary of Twitchell's core concerns, then works through specific examples of commodity publishing (celebrity books, self-help, gift books). The second half pivots to qualified pushback, arguing that popular appeal and literary merit are not mutually exclusive, and closes by suggesting the two can coexist. The structure follows a classic summarize-then-evaluate arc.
Introduction: What's on Your Bookshelf?
What is on your bookshelf — a treasury of Calvin and Hobbes comics, or the collected works of the theologian John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan? What constitutes more worthy reading material? If one reads Carnival Culture by James Twitchell, the fact that Americans are more likely to have read Bill Watterson's cartoon than the seminal text Leviathan by the seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes demonstrates the decline of the publishing industry in a nutshell. The once "cloistered" world of publishing, Twitchell states, has now become overly democratic (71). Hence the frightening speculation: why bother to print Thomas Hobbes when comics turn a better profit?
A canny executive today might even add, speaking after Twitchell's 1991 musings on popular culture, that classics are available on the Internet, so why bother publishing new scholarly editions? As for new authors of literary value who are not even required reading in colleges and high schools, the profit margin is even more dubious. Rather than seeking what is worthy of being read, contemporary book publishers instead focus only on what can be sold. The potboiler has taken over the list.
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