A Conservative Journey Through Literary America — Part 1: Introduction
by Matt PattersonBig Hollywood is a unique and long needed institution – a place where conservatives can gather and talk about pop culture and entertainment, the ultimate goal being, as I understand it, to encourage conservatives to engage in the culture war through the arts.
While the best tactics to achieve this goal are open to debate, its ultimate worth and necessity are indisputable – for too long, conservatives have ceded the most influential segments of society, from academia to Hollywood, to the Left with nary a fight. The current sorry state of our movement is in no small measure the result of this refusal to engage the battle of ideas where it impacts people the most- the culture that they absorb every day through radio, Internet, television, and movies.
The piece which will appear in eight installments, one chapter each Saturday and Sunday, over the next four weeks, however, will deal more specifically with the literary world, and the conservative’s place therein. For contemporary literature (by which I mean drama, poetry, and written fiction) is also more or less the exclusive province of left-wing thinkers and practitioners.
Some may argue that literature these days is not nearly as influential as movies, say, or television, and therefore perhaps not as worthy of conservative efforts to engage. On the face this is true – far more people watch Sex and the City, for example, than read The Kenyon Review. But in a larger sense, this argument misses the point and dangerously underestimates the influence of literature as a vehicle for poisonous ideas to enter the cultural mainstream. (more…)
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