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.

Chapter 2, or, Amy Re-re-revisits Burke

Chapter 2 of the dissertation is currently titled "Burke's Dystopian Imagination." Last summer, I presented a paper at the Triennial KB conference on a panel with His Most Awesomest Jack Selzer, who, along with Ann George, wrote the Totally Rad Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. After Kate's Really Cool Burke video project presentation, Dr Selzer gave me a few notes on my presentation, the key one being that if I was going to do it right, I'd need a whole book--i.e. 10 pages of conference presentation didn't do justice to the thing (his word) I was noticing about Burke.

When I was "given the opportunity" (their words) to rethink my dissertation, I immediately thought of Selzer's advice. At this point, however, moving to a historical, archival dissertation (NOT MY STRENGTH) would have meant another 18 months at Purdue, without funding, so I changed it up and went with the plan I'm now following. Still, I was left with an entire chapter--upwards of 50 pages--to do something like what I imagined before: a review of Burke's general social philosophy throughout his corpus, hopefully linking the subtle changes, as George and Selzer do, to his changing localities, his "circles" of influence.

The result? I'm stuck on page seven, nowhere near even beginning to quote Counter-Statement. I'm stuck where I was when I wrote the Burke presentation the first time: outlining my assumptions about what counts as dystopian literature, what makes something a dystopian argument. Because I can't show how KB is dystopian until I do that, but I also can't explain what I mean by "dystopian" until I can use Burke's terms.

Ouroboros. The snake eating its own tail. Consummation has never looked so complex.

Prospectus, version 1.0

Well, here it is. Attempt #1. This is the introductory statement/rationale, which will eventually become part of the introduction to the dissertation. The rest of the plan can be found on this blog back in October 2008, but I'll be revising that in coming days and weeks.
Suggestions welcome.

The title of the final book of the Christian Bible, John of Patmos' [GREEK FORM GOES HERE] has been translated as "Revelation", but the Greek "Apocalypse" has passed into our vernacular as a synonym for catastrophic endings and destruction. Apocalyptic literature is far older than even the New Testament's Book of Revelation; the apocalyptic books of Enoch, Daniel, Isaiah ......[Baruch?] reveal to their ancient Hebrew listeners the truth of their current situation, a transcendent truth beyond simple predictions of the fall of a civilization, the truth of the nature of history itself.
The lofty goal of apocalyptic literature, the goal of enlightening and revealing, has been subsumed in recent decades by a more (perhaps profitable) concrete purpose of positing possible, albeit dark, futures. The apocalyptic genre has moved from sacred literature to popular fiction, and not without accompanying aesthetic and rhetorical shifts. Whereas once the genre "QUOTE FROM COLLINS," the utopian and dystopian literature produced since the Enlightenment (itself a revelatory moment) lacks a godhead to direct history; instead, human agency and the science of causality together determine whether human civilization continues or falls. Since Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, a teleological sense of history has ruled the fictions--we know we are going somewhere, progressing to some fulfillment of human potential, either ultimately good or horrifically bad. The speculative fiction of the mid-twentieth century was decidedly leaning toward the latter.
These dystopian--or anti-utopian, as some say--fictions, while still firmly within the apocalyptic tradition, Something about fear/pity and tragedy as well. Like the great Greek tragedies, these narratives seem to hold a permanent place in our collective consciousnesses that we wouldn't expect from pulp "science fiction." Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Lord of the Flies are listed on most junior high and high school curricula and feature heavily in Advanced Placement English classes [CITE], and dystopian narratives comprise much of science fiction television and film today. A "dystopian impulse" QUOTE BOOKER. This impulse to explore the end, and, in exploring, reveal and predict it, Quote RABKIN. Human seem to have a need to foresee the end; perhaps as a survival instinct, perhaps as morbid curiosity.
Understandably, most studies of dystopian fiction focus on explicating the particular philosophies and social systems each text proposes; comparisons to Marx's vision, examination of power a la Foucault, reworking of "the human" from Heidegger to Haraway. Frederick Jameson's recent work Archeologies of the Future, much anticipated among utopian studies scholars, offers a predictably Marxist analysis of utopianism, often blurring real utopian projects, formal texts proposing utopian communities, and utopian fictions such as Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis into one, uniform idea. M. Keith Booker's two studies on dystopian fiction provide a good introduction the the genre, but also focuses mainly on the social systems proposed within the texts. Seeing dystopian fiction as literature seems to be a problem among most critics; Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction begins with a disclaimer--he will not be including "didactic fiction" such as Orwell's 1984 in his study because it is too obvious in structure.
Dystopian fiction has often been included in other genre studies, as part of science fiction, fantasy, or both.--something about todorov's genre study and rabkin's--why they don't give us enough, but their overall understand of genre is good. To study the genre of dystopian fiction as literature, we would want to understand how it works, its purpose, its structures, and its rhetorical impacts. Early dystopian fiction such as 1984 and Brave New World have clear directives and proposals for their audiences, but how those arguments are made palatable to a reading audience has not been examined in depth. What, we might ask, is the pleasure of a text mired in death, fear, and loss?
Return to ancient western rhet. Deliberative genre. Kenneth Burke is good for this because his scholarship focuses on social change through text, literature as "equipment for living" and the ameliorative qualities of symbolic action. Burke gives us a language for literature as rhetoric, for aesthetics as persuasion, for heroes as avenues for identification.