I teach a course in the spring entitled American Culture and Its Critics, which will bring together, I hope, the usual diversity of students from anthropology, journalism, English, and political science, in addition to the two sponsoring programs, history and American Studies.  My search for texts that will be mandatory for the class brought me to one of those classic teacher conundrums.  I can’t have the bookstore stock a dozen titles for the course (no, I can’t); but I also don’t want to spend a month scanning essays from critics.  I chose as the core texts Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow; Denning’s The Read more