ABSTRACT
Boyd-Bowman describes how ‘the concept of quality has been shunned in structuralist and post-structuralist writing on culture’. In America the tendency among heretical scholars has been not so much to concern themselves with the possible rare exception to the general mindless output from the cultural industry as to see quality as a property which is closely related to the audience experience, and which may therefore have a more general application to popular culture as a whole. Leslie Fiedler, writing about popular literature at about the same time, approaches the problem of cultural quality from a different angle. The means through which this has been achieved is a set of absolute criteria of discrimination, for instance the easy rule-of-thumb that ‘there is an inverse relationship between literary merit and market-place success’. The text itself has no existence, no life, and therefore no quality until it is deciphered by an individual and triggers the meaning potential carried by this individual.
