This interdisciplinary course combines literary, philosophical and theological analysis to investigate hope and how its formulations in the West have evolved over time, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present. When is hope a virtue or positive aspect of agency, and when is it an illusion or vice? What are the relations of personal to national, political, and religious hopes? Readings will cover poetry and prose fiction, philosophical essays and drama, drawn from the Bible and authors including Hesiod, Lucretius, Cicero, Dante, William Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Emily Dickinson, Kafka, Camus, Holocaust witnesses, and M. L. King.
