The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times
Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction

The Janus-faced nature of hope and its embodiment in the United States’ postwar cultural projects constitute the subject matter of two wonderful new books, Christopher Castiglia’s The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times and George Blaustein’s Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction. Both are concerned with what it meant, and what it might mean, to be engaged as a scholar of American culture in the aftermath of World War II. Both offer—albeit far from didactically—lessons for contemporary scholars of the same, lessons stemming both from the books’ considerable strengths and, much less often, from their minor weaknesses. What is perhaps most notable and praiseworthy about these books is that both authors manage to avoid the deflationary tendency of much contemporary criticism and, indeed, criticism of that criticism, offering accounts that inspire without ever losing their clear-eyed understanding of, and tough-minded engagement with, the...