All 8 Uses of
bourgeois
in
Avant-garde and Kitsch
- In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: -- avant-garde culture.†
*
- Thus our present bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an eternal, "natural" condition of life, but simply the latest term in a succession of social orders.†
- Nevertheless, without the circulation of revolutionary ideas in the air about them, they would never have been able to isolate their concept of the "bourgeois" in order to define what they were not.†
- Courage indeed was needed for this, because the avant-garde's emigration from bourgeois society to bohemia meant also an emigration from the markets of capitalism, upon which artists and writers had been thrown by the falling away of aristocratic patronage.†
- Ostensibly, at least, it meant this -- meant starving in a garret -- although, as we will be shown later, the avant-garde remained attached to bourgeois society precisely because it needed its money.†
- Yet it is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in "detaching" itself from society, it proceeded to turn around and repudiate revolutionary as well as bourgeois politics.†
- The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city's traditional culture.†
- The subject matter of art was prescribed by those who commissioned works of art, which were not created, as in bourgeois society, on speculation.†
Definition:
-
(bourgeois) typical of the middle class or their values and habits - typically used disapprovingly
or (in Marxist theory):
typical of the property-owning classeditor's notes: Bourgeois is often used to refer to the values of the upper middle class. You may also see the term petit bourgeois to describe very small business owners.
Note that bourgeois, bourgeoisie, and bourgeoise are often interchanged.
Bourgeois is most common and can be used as an adjective or a noun. Bourgeoisie is typically used only as a noun, and bourgeoise is occasionally used as an alternate spelling of bourgeois.