Američka neokonzervativna književna kritika: Irving Kristol i Norman Podhoretz
American Neoconservative Literary Criticism of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz

Summary/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.

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