The Rhetoric of Hope

Hope, I posit, is not an emotion, but a critical perspective attained after evaluating current conditions. Hope is thus constructed by our orientation to our experiences and our critical interpretation of sensory input. As a construct, hope is rhetorical, constructed by language, the result of the application of a terministic screen.
This orientation of hope is entelechial, or at least teleological. We hope for something; a desire that is to be fulfilled at some future date. We hope for some end result of the unfolding of history. That desire--a utopian yearning to eliminate hardships and conflict--is grounded in our interpretations of the current state of affairs and what we see as possible or probable outcomes. In this, we can also hope against something, position ourselves opposite of the possibilities inherent in the present.
When we hope, we construct, through imagination and through the logic of cause and effect, the future. When we hope, we provide a vision made manifest through humanity's symbol-using abilities. The future, an absence made present through our use of symbols as abstracted referents, can be evaluated as something to be hoped for or hoped against, and this prescribes a course of action.
The hope of a text, thus, does not have to remain within the world of the text; a text can be hopeful in its projection of future action for or against onto the readers. The most hopeless dystopian novel (in which our hero dies without resolving anything, and the dystopian culture seems to extend infinitely beyond the end of the text) may in fact be hopeful in its relationship to the reader. In positing the future, in making it manifest (enacting the crime, as Burke would say), the text prescribes actions for its readers, actions which will (with hope) prevent the future it describes.
"Action" of course, for Burke, may be first appear as "attitude." In changing attitudes of readers, a text may, in fact, effect change by changing the scene; the instant readers change their orientations and approaches to their own scene, the scene itself has been altered, thus altering the grounds from which the first entelechial extrapolation the text provides. We might even say that the very writing of the text is itself a revolutionary action in that the act of writing changes the author, who is part of his or her own scene.
The rhetoric of hope is always that of change; even those who hope against change recognize the ambiguities of their situation that would enable the transformations they hope against. Hope is syllogistic in its argument: If, then, else. Hope is dialectic in that it positions the present against the future, thesis and antithesis, denying neither their importance, negating neither in favor of the other.
The dystopian motive, the way of seeing that prescribes action, is essentially hopeful. Because it is a motive, Burke would ask us to examine what it means when we say why people are doing it--to look at the language used in dystopic rhetoric and/or the rhetoric of hope. In Chapters 3 and 4 I take two of the most celebrated dystopian narratives as examples of how we talk about dystopia and the implications made when we would imagine disaster; how authors tend to form their narratives, repeated ideas that become tropes, how dystopian writers feature scene over all else, what we can learn about our understanding of endings and ends from the entelechial principle enacted in these texts.