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.