Offers a positive approach to literary criticism
At a moment when the "hermeneutics of suspicion" is under fire in
literary studies, The Practices of Hope encourages an alternative
approach that, rather than abandoning critique altogether, relinquishes
its commitment to disenchantment. As an alternative, Castiglia offers
hopeful reading, a combination of idealism and imagination that retains
its analytic edge yet moves beyond nay-saying to articulate the values
that shape our scholarship and creates the possible worlds that animate
genuine social critique. Drawing on a variety of critics from the Great
Depression to the Vietnam War, from Granville Hicks and Constance Rourke
to Lewis Mumford, C.L.R. James, Charles Feidelson, and Richard Poirier,
Castiglia demonstrates that their criticism simultaneously denounced the
social conditions of the Cold War United States and proposed ideal
worlds as more democratic alternatives.
Organized around a series of terms that have become anathema to
critics--nation, liberalism, humanism, symbolism--The Practices of Hope
shows how they were employed in criticism's "usable past" to generate an
alternative critique, a practice of hope.