Carol Iannone

Carol Ann Iannone (born February 17, 1948 ) is an American literary critic and journalist best known for her vehement rejection of feminism , " political correctness ", affirmative action , multiculturalism and other allegedly left or liberal positions. In 1991, her ultimately failed candidacy for a seat on the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities caused a scandal, which was also widely reported and debated in the broad press and which was one of the high points of the culture wars (“ culture wars ”) of the 1980s and 1990s Years represents.

career

Publication and teaching activities

Iannone received his PhD in 1981 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a thesis on feminist literary theory. In 1987 she was one of the founders of the conservative learned society National Association of Scholars (NAS) and temporarily acted as editor of her publication Academic Questions , which she still has today (2013) as Editor-at-Large in the legal notice. Iannone also taught at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University .

Around 1985 she replaced Pearl K. Bell as a literary critic at Commentary magazine , which, under the editorship of Norman Podhoretz (1960–1995), had changed from a left-wing or left-wing liberal newspaper to a mouthpiece for American neoconservatism . Here she published a total of 39 essays on literature and cultural policy up to 2008, in addition she publishes more frequently in the National Review , The New Criterion and other conservative media.

Controversy 1991

In 1991, then US President George Bush proposed Iannone for one of the 24 posts on the Advisory Board of the National Endowment for the Humanities . The nomination led to controversy for months, in which many of the leading figures and institutions of the American literary and cultural industry participated, and failed in the vote in the United States Senate in July of that year due to opposition from the Democrats led by Edward Kennedy . The reason given by their opponents was that Iannone had hardly appeared as an academic and, since her dissertation in 1981, had not published any scientific, but only journalistic work and played no role in the academic discourse, as the citation indices showed. With this justification , two of the most important scientific societies in the USA, the Modern Language Association and the American Council of Learned Societies , spoke out against the appointment of Iannones.

This formal justification was overlaid by cultural-political arguments in the debate about Iannone's personality. Iannone has been more or less bluntly accused of racism from various quarters, such as Joel Cannaroe, President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation , and Stanley Fish , that it is well known that the NAS is thoroughly racist; Garry Wills accused her of bigotry in his column, which was reprinted in numerous American newspapers. An article that Iannone had published in Commentary the year before was particularly controversial . In this, she castigated the tendency that was evident to her that literary prizes, academic posts and the like were only awarded to representatives of social minorities for reasons of race politics. In particular, she criticized the jury of the National Book Award for the freestyle of Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1989). Proponents saw the rejection of Iannones as a purely ideologically motivated witch hunt and saw the freedom of speech in danger.

literature

• Minutes of the July 16, 1991 session of the United States Senate , pp. S10131 – S10132 (including in full several articles from the Washington Post , Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers on the Iannone affair).
• DG Myers: Carol Iannone and the Politics of Scholarship . In: South Carolina Review 25, 1993, pp. 74-82.
• Viveca Novak: The Accused . In: Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life , October 1991 issue, pp. 16-21.

Web links

• Article by Carol Iannone in the National Review
• Article by Carol Iannone in The New Criterion

Individual evidence

1. ^ Benjamin Balint : Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right . Public Affairs, New York 2010, p. 149.
2. ↑ Barbara Gamarekian: Humanities Nominee Rejected in Senate. In: The New York Times , July 18, 1991.
3. ↑ Jack Miles: The 'Dictatorship of Mediocrity'. In: Los Angeles Times , July 7, 1993.
4. ↑ Minutes of the Senate meeting  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on Jul 16, 1991, pp. S10131-S10132.  
5. ↑ See, for example, David G. Myers: Politicizing Scholarship: The Iannone Affair. In: South Carolina Review. 25, 1993, pp. 74-82.