Humanism

This chapter examines the career of Newton Arvin’s creation of queer humanism, combining the progressive socialism of the 1930s and the experiential innovation of an ethics of enhancement. In his readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, Arvin conjoined creative imagination, social idealism, and human solidarity, generating a vital critical alternative to a disenchanting “cant of pessimism.” In the works of American Romanticism, Arvin found examples of practiced movements from pain to wonder, generating both personal and social dissatisfaction (generating critique) and endurance (ensuring the perpetual life of ideals). Arvin endorsed the socialist humanism he found in literary depictions of erotic fraternalism. Within those queer social visions, the conventions of prescribed life give way to the fantastic, extraordinary, and unprecedented. In such moments—the moments that Arvin recognized as central to the romance—new assemblages are worked out in the service of human possibility. Throughout his scholarship, Arvin combined imagination, sexuality, and humanism, placing the hybrid—the dispositional ethics of hope—at the center of the American literary canon and of a critical practice still available today.

Liberalism

Beginning with debates in the 1940s between progressive liberals and New Liberals, this chapter argues that Richard Chase adapted the ideals of collective sympathies, social critique, and hopeful idealism central to a previous generation’s liberalism while adapting them to the changing conditions of early Cold War America. In so doing, Chase transformed a politics originally understood as a revolution in material conditions into a psychological struggle toward a social ideal that looked surprisingly progressive. That transformation is most evident in Chase’s discussions of allegory, which became in his handling a demonstration of simultaneous alienation and idealism, of human limitation and social aspiration. Melville’s allegories, in Chase’s analysis, combine a critique of a culture of conformity and a vision of how that society might be revitalized. By shaping Melville into a writer capable of critique and idealism, critique as idealism, Chase made Romanticism an effective critical practice of hope. The particular hope Melville’s allegories offered Chase centered on same-sex countersocialities that exemplified anti–Cold War ideals. Representing both the historic formation of sexual subcultures and the idealist vision of a radical countersociality, same-sex intimacy was at the core, for Chase, of the genre of allegory.

Nation

Taking the Cold War state to be the origin of diffused suspicion, abstract enemies, and totalizing explanations, this chapter contends that contemporary ideology critique—based on the same dispositions—melancholically reproduces rather than challenges Cold War epistemologies. As an alternative, the chapter offers the practice of hope Granville Hicks and Constance Rourke developed around the empty signifiers nation, exceptionalism, and activism, concepts most often targeted by New Americanists (and New Historicists in general). Hicks argued for two Americas, one synonymous with capitalism and hence worthy of critique, and the other based on local communities that use nationhood to organize against capitalism and the models of national exceptionalism it requires. For Hicks, patriotism is an organizing concept for the economically disadvantaged majority who are weakened by their denied access to rhetorics of national belonging. Constance Rourke, turning to folkways that transform European culture into something distinctly American, focused on the specificity of cultures produced by distinctive communities within the United States, yet she used the particularity of cultural formations as the basis, rather than simply a renunciation, of national identity.

Introduction

In place of the disenchantment fostered by much contemporary criticism, the introduction offers hope as an alternative critical disposition. Hope, the introduction argues, is a disposition toward the imaginative value of dissatisfaction and the social value of imagination: illusion, whimsy, vision, reverie, daydreams, all sources of world making trivialized within disciplinary regimes of the “real.” Hope is the articulation of the origins of critique in imaginative idealism, self-consciously unachievable standards for living, tested and refined in the context of an as-yet-unreal world, against which real conditions inevitably come up short. The book’s introduction introduces a range of critics who, although they wrote during the disenchanted years of the Cold War, developed and refined critical practices of hope. Whether through the democratic deliberations occasioned by myth or the sexual sociality fostered by symbolism or the renovated collectivities organized by nationalism, those critics took terms we currently dismiss and made them hopeful occasions for critical wonder.

Symbolism

The chapter examines the use of symbolism by three critics: Charles Feidelson, Marius Bewley, and Richard Poirier. For all three, the critique carried out by symbolism, refusing the division of the real and the unreal, content and style, allowing the latter to suffuse the former, becomes a visionary hopefulness. The imaginative eccentricities of literary form, mirroring the symbolic practices of urban homosexual subcultures, are what bring people to literature not just as an escape from everyday life but as speculations about a world differently configured. Faced with Cold War homophobia, these critics turned to issues of secrecy, suffering, and fellowship, making symbolism into a form of queer world making. When symbols open up a reflective space in the closed surface of reason or convention, they reveal an aspiration that is also a speculative disposition, suggesting a not-yetness that gestures beyond the is-ness of painful realities. Symbols are at once familiar, quotidian, transgressive, and even erotic. They are a hopeful phenomenon, expressing a conviction that objects (and people) have a mystical something that gives them more than predictable significance, endowing them with a sense that the physical and the metaphysical exist in a dynamic simultaneity. This is what, for these critics, makes symbolism queer.