Writing the Future

Rhetorical Analysis:  Some Uses of the Future(s)

length:  3-4 pages (by which I mean:  go on to the fourth sheet of paper by at least a word, but not on to a fifth)

due dates:  9.14 (topic/proposal), 9.17 (draft), 9.21 (final)

This first assignment is of a piece with the conversations we’ve been having in class thus far.  Your task is to find some text (where “text” includes visual and audio media), event, or phenomenon that makes rhetorical use of the future in some interesting way and to unpack it in the terms we’ve been using.  You should be thinking about things like ethos/pathos/logos, ideology, genre, audience, context, effect.  We seek here not to understand whether a particular vision of the future is true, accurate, or plausible, but to unpack how it is being used rhetorically, to what ends, for what audience, how effectively, and so on.  The question, as always, is not what the thing in front of us means, but what it does.  What is its force in the world, either intended or actual?  What is the gap between the two?

Some questions to think about, to kick-start your analysis:

• Is your object of analysis fictional or ostensibly nonfictional?  How does its (non)fictionality play into its rhetorical functioning?  Is it more believable and convincing because it’s presented as nonfiction?  More digestible or subtle because it’s presented as fiction?
• What are the typical expectations of its medium (think, for instance, of Have a Nice Doomsday‘s account of the Left Behind video games, and the weirdness of transmitting moral content through a medium in which one typically shoots and kills bad guys)?  Does your text deviate from them in interesting ways?  Do those expectations lend themselves to particular kinds of imaginings of the future?
• What kind of future is being invoked?  Is it a bad future against which we are being warned, or a positive future towards which an audience is supposed to yearn?
• Who is the audience of this text/phenomenon?  Is there a difference between the audience the text wants to reach and the audiences it actually reaches (think again of the Left Behind video games, and the difficulties of trying to sell a moralistic message through a medium largely designed for people not hugely receptive to such messages)?
• How does the speaker/writer/creator convince you of the plausibility of his or her imagined future?  Are there appeals made to his or her ethos (credibility, authority, trustworthiness), i.e. “so-and-so has successfully predicted x thing in the past,” or “so-and-so has written seven books on such-and-such”?
• Any rhetorical use of the future must imagine some connection between the present and the future it depicts.  How plausible is that connection here?  Is the logic of the connection implicit (as in Apple’s “1984” ad) or explicit (as in something like An Inconvenient Truth)?  To what extent does the text/phenomenon rely on a logos appeal, calling attention to the logic and plausibility of its claims, vs. other appeals?
• What is the nature of the pathos appeal of the text/phenomenon?  How is this rhetorically deployed future supposed to make you feel?
• What, if anything, is the call to action?  What is the text/phenomenon trying to make you do or do differently in the world, so as to embrace or avoid the future it depicts?
• In line with the Darko Suvin piece, is there anything about the present that the text/phenomenon is trying to estrange, to make weird or unrecognizable?

Consider, too, your voice in this paper.  The task is analytical, but that doesn’t mean your writing has to be dry.  Guyatt manages to produce fairly compelling prose throughout Have a Nice Doomsday, even when he’s unpacking somewhat dry points of scripture or political history.