HOPE AND HOPELESSNESS
The confidence of earlier epochs seems to have evaporated from our own. Progress, modernization, freedom, equality, enlightenment: the list of hopeful concepts from an ever-receding past is a long one. And yet ours is not the first era to grapple with despair or promises seemingly unfulfilled. At the same time, a counterpoint surge in utopian thinking seems to validate Ernst Bloch's intuitions about a fundamental utopian impulse. An impulse that likewise can be traced to distant times or places. Are hope and hopelessness interdependent sensibilities or is this a peculiar characteristic of our times? This semester's program will explore past, present, and emerging landscapes of hope and hopelessness, perhaps with Kafka's rejoinder to Max Brod in our ear: “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope--but not for us.”
Lectures
All lectures begin at 6 p.m. unless otherwise noted, and are held in the Daniel Family Commons, which is located in the Usdan University Center.
A Pessimist's Tour of the Post-Freudian Unconscious.
09/12/2016
BLAKEY VERMEULE • Stanford University
The Economy of Hope
09/19/2016
HIROKAZU MIYAZAKI • Cornell University
Hopes of killing: the cultural politics of eradication
10/3/2016
FIONA PROBYN-RAPSEY • University of Wollongong
Afro-Pessimism and the Ruse of Analogy
10/10/2016
FRANK WILDERSON • UC Irvine
Carceral Logic and the Paradox of Hope
10/17/2016
LORI GRUEN • Wesleyan University
Dialogism and the Prophecy of Destruction: Martin Buber, Stefan Zweig, and Franz Werfel
11/7/2016
NITZAN LEBOVIC • Lehigh University
The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between.
11/14/2016
JAMES YOUNG • U. Mass
Weird Science: The Return to Empiricism in Literary Studies
11/21/16
LILY SAINT • Wesleyan University
Consuming Darkness: Melodrama and Comedy in Television Storytelling
11/28/2016
ELIZABETH G. TRAUBE • Wesleyan University
Movies and Entertaining Social Change: On Popularizing Strategies, the Hope Industry, and the Uses of Soft Capitalism
12/5/2016
JOEL PFISTER • Wesleyan University