No prejudice seems more acceptable than the animosity toward "difficult" poetry. (TKOP for short, as seen on Janet Holmes' Humanophone. or avant-garde music, abstract painting, etc... ). Since it's sort of a snobbism in reverse, it doesn't even seem like snobbism. After all, the victims of this prejudice ARE the snobs, those people who think they are better than us because they can understand what's going on. It's a struggle even in academia, where colleagues who think nothing of curling up with a Judith Butler book at night might recoil at the mention of Lezama Lima.

If someone were to condemn Brazilian soap operas as not really worth the time to study, that person would be roundly rebuked--and rightly so. Everything human lies within the scope of the humanities. It is true that this prejudice against mass culture persists among some older people--more or less the generation that has just retired from the university, but the prejudice against difficult contemporary works is probably stronger than ever.