Review article
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.22210/ur.2024.068.1/04
American Neoconservative Literary Criticism of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz
Sebastian A. Kukavica
; Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Neoconservatism should be understood as a form of American conservative ideology; as a
specific project of political philosophy aimed at overcoming the perceived stage of nihilism in
the United States after 1968; as a metapolitical project aimed at achieving political hegemony
through prior establishment of cultural hegemony; and as a revivalist rhetoric of the grand
narrative of American exceptionalism. The political myth of decadence reveals itself as matrix
of the central concepts of neoconservatism. Neoconservative literary criticism arises from the
fundamental metapolitical premise that only through the establishment of cultural hegemony
and the revaluation of political concepts and the constitutive values of the political regime
decadence can be prevailed and cultural palingenesis initiated. Calling for a strict scrutiny
over literature and its purification from contagion of decadence, neoconservatives perceive
modern literature as a potential threat and a reservoir of antinomian political imagination that
undermines the American political regime by challenging and debunking its constitutive values.
Therefore, neoconservatives conceive literary criticism as a metapolitical tool for delegitimizing
decadent literature and, ultimately, offering a vision of a morally rejuvenated and purified
literature reflecting the constitutive values of the American political regime, the orthodoxy
of its republican virtue, and its alleged public morality. The remoralization of literature that
neoconservatives present as the goal of their literary criticism is thus only part of a more systematic
project of neoconservative political imagination, which, due to the proclaimed collapse
of the liberal political imagination, presents itself as the only sufficiently powerful, politically
and philosophically well-founded, as well as ideologically alluring basis for re-enchantment
and legitimation of the American political regime. Through the analysis of literary criticism
by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz as the most influential neoconservatives of the first
generation, this paper demonstrates the characteristics of the neoconservative metapolitical
crusade against the decadent literature in the USA.
Keywords
neoconservatism, metapolitics, decadence, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz
Hrčak ID:
319208
URI
Publication date:
15.7.2024.
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