Exhibition detail: Petrit Halilaj. An Opera Out of Time. Berlin, 2026.
Hope seems to be a familiar concept to almost everyone. Yet while there is a whole discipline devoted to this human capacity in psychology (hope studies) and the topic has been approached from ancient to 21st-century philosophy, it is rarely considered in literary and cultural studies. Shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, the term was incorporated in the portmanteau word ‘hopium’ (i.e. hope and opium), as slang among financial traders to describe the tendency to hold on to a stock even as it continued to fall. By the 2020s, ‘hopium’ has come to refer to “all kinds of delusional hopes” (Taylor 2024). How is it possible that ‘hope’ was both the slogan of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 and is, in other contexts, used synonymously with ‘delusion’ or ‘naivety’? Why do most humanities disciplines evade the topic altogether?
Using these and related questions as a starting point, the Frankfurt School of Hope (FSH) puts a critical investigation of the concept ‘hope’ at its heart. In particular, the FSH believes in the potential of narrative and storytelling and their connection to expressions of hope. Storytelling and hoping are intrinsically related. Both are practices, modes and attitudes that characterize humans; for now, at least, AIs and machines cannot hope. Both enable those narrating or hoping to take a stance towards the Here and Now, imagine worlds and create perspectives for the future.
Notably, stories told by fiction books and theatre have provided people with hope during the recent COVID-19 pandemic (Liedke/Pietrzak-Franger 2021, 134-35). But this discussion is not only limited to pandemic times (see Gammel 2020, Noack 2020, Solnit 2020 & 2016, Wiegand 2020, “Books to Rekindle Hope” 2024, Whitmore 2016). Looking at the time since the industrialization constitutes a promising testing ground for an investigation of the status of hope in European literatures, as their histories have brought forth hope narratives in varied forms as responses to different socio-political challenges and thus exacerbated the connection between literature and hope. One of the main goals of the FSH is to connect researchers across national borders and disciplines. Through this, hope research can become an interdisciplinary field in terms of its methodological, conceptual and theoretical scope.
The events and activities of the FSH in its initial stages focus on the following three areas of investigation:
MATERIAL/MEDIATED DIMENSION OF HOPE:
How and in response to what is hope rendered in different types of (literary) texts and how does it reflect a historically specific mentality? A working hypothesis is that hope is especially expressed in times of human-made disasters (or the polycrisis, Tooze 2022) as an immediate aesthetic response that may become radical. The last 250 years pose a valid testing ground to investigate how expressions of hope emerge in light of rapidly changing societal circumstances. These expressions are likely extremely varied, ranging from poetic, nostalgic hope to activist hope (which is related to Lear’s [2008] radical hope) or playful, ‘juvenile’ hope.
TEMPORAL DIMENSION OF HOPE:
What is the connection between hope and temporality – is hope future-oriented, is it a stance toward the present or does it collapse time? Studies on speculative fiction, sustainability and posthumanist philosophy (Braidotti 2022, 2002) and utopian studies and utopian literature are concerned with the not-yet. While hope is often conceptualized as the ‘not-yet-here’ (Bloch), also within queer studies (Muñoz 2019), it is necessary to queer this temporally restricted understanding. Hope expresses itself inasmuch as an attitude towards the present as one towards the future and past. These considerations grow out of recent queer scholarship on temporality and the past (Cvetkovich 2003, Love 2009 and Walsh 2023).
STRUCTURAL/PERFORMATIVE
DIMENSIONS OF HOPE or
HOPE AS FORM:
Can hope also be understood as a formal and aesthetic category which renders hopeful texts distinct from others? Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been an increased formal experimentation among authors and artists to use literature as a vehicle to express the unspeakably complex condition of being human, from the nihilism of Dada and surrealism, the fragmentation of Cubism and Modernism to the loss of any certainty in Postmodernism. At the same time, more recent literary phenomena point toward an almost conservative harking back to more Realist modes of storytelling, as if to create stories that have more substance. As Liedke has recently argued (2024, 2025) hope dismantles this binary between ‘fragmentary’ and ‘coherent’ and, when understood as form, creates narratives that are both fragmented and coherent. While in some texts, this concerns only passages, in others, it is a defining feature. This area of investigation is concerned with hope, not just as an individual emotion, but as it unfolds in a structure of relationality, community-making and performance.
