Time: Wednesday 27 May 2026 at 13:15
Venue: Aula, Collegium Heliodori Święcicki, Grunwaldzka 6
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Heidi Lucja Liedke (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Hope as Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction
Abstract
This talk proposes “elpilogy” as a new subdiscipline within literary studies devoted to examining hope as both thematic content and formal structure in contemporary fiction. Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s concept of “educated hope” and José Esteban Muñoz’s queer utopianism, Heidi Lucja Liedke argues that hope operates not as naïve optimism but as a cognitive and affective stance that confronts obstacles while maintaining orientation toward possibility. The analysis situates this approach within post-critique methodologies, particularly reparative and surface reading as theorised by Sedgwick, Best, Marcus, and Felski. Through readings of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? and Ali Smith’s Autumn, the talk demonstrates how formal devices — epistolary exchange and fragmentary dialogue — create intradiegetic spaces where characters rehearse ethical positions and articulate vulnerability. These structures function as “telescopes” (in Bloch’s metaphor) that enable proximity to what remains unfinished, contested, or unrealised. Hope thus emerges as a relational mode inseparable from the friction and obstacles against which it defines itself.
About the speaker
Prof. Dr. Heidi Lucja Liedke is Professor of English Literature and Performance at Goethe University Frankfurt. From 2018–2020 she was a Humboldt Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. Recent publications have appeared in Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and the Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. In 2026, she founded the ‘Frankfurt School of Hope’, a research network concerned with the study of narratives of hope across different genres. In her current project, she is looking at literary responses to fascism from the 1920s to the 2020s. During her sabbatical from April-September 2026 she is Visiting Fellow at the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University, USA, and Visiting Fellow at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Wrocław.
About the lecture series
WA Distinguished Professors’ Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with the faculty and students.