Connor, Ulla. “New Directions in Contrastive Rhetoric”

ABSTRACT: [TESOL Quarterly. 36.4 (Winter 2002): 493-510]

Contrastive rhetoric examines differences and similarities in writing across cultures.  Although mainly concerned with student essay writing in its first 30 years, the area of study today contributes to knowledge about preferred patterns of writing in many English for specific purposes situations.  This article discusses some of the new directions contrastive rhetoric has taken.  Following a brief review of the goals, methods, and accomplishments of research in contrastive rhetoric during the past 30 years, the article examines how contrastive rhetoric has been pursued with varying aims and methods in a variety of EFL situations involving academic and professional writing.  Recent criticisms of contrastive rhetoric and their efforts on changing directions are then surveryed.  (493)

“In the early years, contrastive rhetoric was heavily based on applied linguistic and linguistic text analysis” (496).

“The past 30-plus years have seen significan changes as contrastive rhetoric has benefited from insights drawn from four domains: text linguistics, the analysis of writing as a cultural and educational activity, classroom-based studies of writing, and contrastive genre-specific studies” (497).

“It is embracing research-situated reflexivity and is becoming more sensitive to the social context and the local situatedness and particularity of writing activity.  The increasingly context-sensitive research often involves studying the talk that surrounds text production and interpretation as well as writing processes and written products themselves (Connor, Hallech, & Mbaye, 2002)” (506).

“Yet, at the very least, contrastive rhetoric research could look for patterns across text genres in a given culture” (506).

“Finally, because culture and genres are viewed as dynamic and fluid, contrastive rhetoric would be well advised to study text diachronically to identify the evolution of patterns and norms” (506).

Cahill, David. “The Myth of the “Turn” in Contrastive Rhetoric”

ABSTRACT: [Written Communitation, 20:2 (4/2003) 170-194]

Contrastive rhetoric scholarship researches rhetorical structures across languages to predict the difficulties experienced by students learning to write essays in a second language.  The paradigmatic contrast is between Western languages (e.g., English) that are said to exemplify “linearity” and “directness” and Eastern languages (e.g., Chinese, Japanese) that are said to exemplify “nonlinearity” and “indirectness.”  The prime examples in English-language contrastive rhetoric scholarship of Asian essay structure are the four-part Chinese qi cheng zhuan he and Japanes ki sho ten ketsu, whose third steps are said to represent a “turn.”  The author’s research into Chinese and Japanese-language scholarship on these two structures finds that the “turn” is not a rhetorical move of “circularity” or “digression” as commonly assumed but rather serves as the occasion to develop an essay further by alternative means.  This implication for second-language writing is recognition of greater similarities in essayist litercy across these languages than previously supposed. (170)

“In the context of essay writing, the turn may loosely be defined as the ocassion to develop an essay or paragraph further by alternative means.  This redefinition demythologizes the turn from something mysteriouly “Eastern” into something closer to the Western rhetorical notion of amplification, broadly understood.  The significant pedagogical implication is that the Chinese and the Japanese essay are more like the English essay than is commonly accepted” (173).

“In what I call the contrastive interpretation, zhuan/ten signifies something closer to the meaning of the term, “turn,” loosely conceived.  In the broadest sense, shuan/ten introduces a new aspect on the thesis or topic laid out in qu/ki and cheng/sho (Chou, 1989; Di, 1984; Okuaki, 1993; Z. Zhang, 1959).  Alternatively, zhuan/ten introduces an opposing perspective or counterargument following the argument in cheng/sho (Di, 1984; Okuaki, 1993; K. Wang, 1991); zhuan/ten refutes a counterargument laid out in qi/ki and cheng/sho, in which cas contrastive zhuan/ten-as-thesis (unlike noncontrastive zhuan/ten-as-thesis) serves to introduce the controversial thesis of the author vis-a-vis the status quo (Chou, 1989; Di, 1984; Shoudu Shifan Dazue, 1998); or, zhuan/ten provides an element of surprise (Okuaki, 1993; Takahashi, 1993).  (186)

“The pedagogical implications of these differing views are significant.  Western teachers influenced by the contrastive-rhetoric accounts of the East-Asian “turn” may be inclined to expect or see such “turn” in the English compositions of their Asian writing students where they are in fact not there at all; they may be resistant to the possiblity that the rhetorical structures used by their Asian students may not be all that different from English rhetorical structure.  While sincerely attempting to help their students’ writing, such teachers may inadvertently be grossly misreading it” (187).

Bhabha, Homi K. “The Postcolonial and Postmodern: The Question of Agency” (from The Location of Culture)

“[F]or some of us the principle of indeterminism is what makes the conscious freedom of man fathomable.”-Jacques Derrida, “My chances”/”Mes chances”

“Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South.  They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples.  They formulate their cirtical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments with the ‘rationalizations’ of modernity” (246).

“It requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written, the rearticulation of the ‘sign’ in which cultural indenities may be inscribed” (246).

“Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational.  It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the ‘middle passage’ of slavery and indenture, the ‘voyage out’ of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the Second World, . . . . Culture is translation translational because such spartial histories of displacement-now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of ‘global’ media technologies-make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue” (247).

“It is from this hybrid location of cultural value – the transnational as the translational – that the postcolonial intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical and literatry project” (248).

“Postcolonial critical discourses require forms of dialectical thinking that do not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic domain of psychic and social identifications.  The incommensurabiltiy of cultural values and priorities that the postcolonial critic represents cannot be accommodated with theories of cultural relativism or pluralism” (249).

“Current debates in postmodernism question the cunning of modernity – its historical ironies, its disjunctive temporalities, its paradoxes of progress, its representational aporia.  It would profoundly change the values, and judgements, of such interrogations, if they were open to the argument that metropolitan histories of civitas cannot be conceived without evoking the savage colonial antecedents of the ideals of civility.  It also suggests, by implication, that the language of rights and obligations, so central to the modern myth of a people, must be questioned on the basis of the anomalous and discriminatory legal and cultural status assigned to migrant, diasporic, and refugee populations.  Inevitably, they find themselves on the frontiers between culture and nations, often on the other side of the law” (251).

“My shift from the cultural as an epistemological object to culture as an enactive, enunciatory site opens up possibilities for other ‘times’ of cultural meaning (retroactive, prefigurative) and other narrative spaces (fantasmic, metaphorical).  My purpose in specifying the enunciative present in articullation of culture is to provide a process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of their history and experience.  My theoretical argument has a descriptive history in recent work in literary and cultural studies by African American and black British writers” (255).

“. . . the act of erasing the politics of binary opposition – the inverted polarities of counter politics (Gates).  There is an attempt to construct a theory of the social imaginary that requires no subject expressing originary anguish (West), no signular self-image (Gates), no necessary or eternal belongingness (Hall).  The contingent and the liminal become the times and the spaces for the historical representation of the subjects of cultural difference in a postcolonial criticism” (256).

“Beyond Theory” (256-8).

“Outside the Sentence” (258-61).

“The form of agency that I’ve attempted to describe through the cut and thrust of sign and symbol, the signifying conditions of contingency, the night-time of love, returns to interrogate that most audacious dialectic of modernity provided by contemporary theory – Foucault’s Man and his double’.  Foucault’s productive influence on postcolonial scholars, from Australia to India, has not been unqualified; particularly in his construction of modernity” (278).

 

Combs, Steven C. The Dao of Rhetoric

S. C. Combs suggests that Daoism may be used as a method to evaluate texts and film.  This method moves the conversation beyond the Western interpretation of rhetorics.  “In Daoism, there is one world, and it alone constitutes reality.  There is no independent agent, such as a god, to provide order and life.  The world’s order results from a continuous interaction of the opposing forces of ‘yin’ and ‘yang’.  Reality is a ceaseless alternative “between rising and falling, emerging  and collapsing, moving and attaining equilibrium that is occasioned by its own internal energy of transformation” (10).

“Doaists reject linear explanations of events.  Texts are not caused by situations but are part of them.  There is an interactive flux that dynamically conditions all features in the environmental field.  Situating Daoism with a time frame in which certain events took place does not mean that those events caused the sages to say what they did in a linear sense.  It is more appropriate to say tha Daoist thought influenced historically situated events just as those events affected Daoist thought” “To treat Daoism with an appreciation for its texts and contexts is to recognize its fluid and dynamic presence in the world” (13).

“Yin is passive energy–motionless and still, sometimes described as feminine, earthy, or dark.  Yang is active and overt energy–male, fiery, or light” (26).

“Laozi recognizes the inadequacies of language and the nonproductivity of argumentation, yet uses words to espouse a philosophy in opposition to Confucianism in the Dao de jing.  Notice that he does not advocate silence, nor is he opposed to the use of language.  His advise to communicators is to speak naturally, that is, rarely and plainly.  Furthermore, words must be chosen very carefully.  Communicators must focus on the Dao, and cycle their linguistic choices through a lens that sees the particular and its connection to or inclusion in the universal” (34).

“Zhuangzi took the problem of classification even further.  He believed that the use of language created distinctions and value judgments that “clouded” people’s minds, preventing them from seeing the unity, or Dao, of the universe.  “In other words, language, to the extent it functions as a dchotomizing element, is an obstacle to truth and knowledge” (p. 244).  Furthermore, the abuse of symbols “led to the formation of a hierarchical society, caused greed and fear to flourish, and encouraged people to engage in endless disputations over truth and falsehood” (pp. 238-39).  Thus, words were not only lacking, but also caused a number of problems in classical China” (46).

Use of Parables.

“Based on Kennedy’s distinctions, Daoist rhetoric is a philosophical rhetoric.  The focus of Daoist rhetoric is Daoism; rhetoric is subsumed with the larger philosophy.  Daoist rhetoric engages audiences in philosophical conversations that have tremendous moral implications and provides principles for communication in service of a philosophy.  Rhetoric from this perspective, stands in service of Daoism, and tests of rhetorical propriety ae the extent to which the use of rhetoric promotes or espouses the Dao.  Daoist rhetoric is thus similar to Platonic or Christian rehtoric” (75).

  

Lyon, Aravella. “Rhetoric Authority in Athenian Democracy and the Chinese Legalism of Han Fei.”

“Why do the rulers listen to the wild theories of the speech-makers, and bring destruction to the state and ruin themselves?  Because they do not distinguish clearly between public and private interests, do not examine the aptness of the words they hear, and do not make certain that punishments are meted out when they are deserved. (“The Five Vermin,” 113)—Han Fei (?289-233 B.C.E)”

Han Fei: “As a Legalist, a leader in the school of classical Chinese philosophy concerned with law and method as a means of ruling, he provides a good path into imagining alternative placements of act and authority.  His writing, _Han Fei Zi_, influenced the first emperor of emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi, and so indirectly took part in the unification of the Chinese empire.  Furthermore, his political philosophy coupled with his concept of the power/position (shi) and political rhetoric reveals the lapses of and gaps in democratic rhetoric and its focus on individual and textual authority.  Finally, his work is helpful for thinking about speech acts: legal or conventional speech acts, non-actions as acts and hence also a means to an end, and rhetorical speech acts” (53).

According to John T. Kirby, rhetoric is not Aristotle’s persuasion, but it is “another type of human pursuit, a ‘techne’ with demonstrable principles” (53).

(55-57) Confuscians=the good man; Daoism=nature; and Fei=Law.  Fei is more interesting the “public code” even if the state is “oppressive” in nature.  The law is more important that the state of the individual. 

Public/Private/Political spheres.  “To escape others’ power, the ruler must be emotionally isolated in the public and private sphere.  As an ideal, an embodiment of the law, he has no space where he is a man and not a ruler.  Han Fei’s ruler offers no speech that is dialogic in its trust and so he is cut off from the forces of persuasion” (60).  [Similar to African tribal structure and ruling classes.  Saving Face].

” . . . Han Fei advocates that rulers lead through a method of ‘wuwei,’ translated as “non-action,” “doing nothin,” or “effortless action,” as ‘wuwei’ is both safer for the ruler and more effective.  In “The Way of the Ruler,” he observes that and “enlightened ruler reposes in non-action above and his ministers tremble with fear” (17)” . . . “Inaction is paradoxically a catalyst for action” (62).

**Keeping and maintaining authority. 

“While China had a notion of the sophistic, Han Fei’s primary concern is with public benefit and the safety of both audience and rhetor, both ruler and minister.  He does not envision perlocutionary speech acts and dialogue as bringing humans closer to the truth as he is not concerned with truth, but rather stability of the state and the avoidance of disruptive violence” (65-66).

The Athenian view (West) uses persuasive powers of the rhetor to maintain the state.  Using this same framework for viewing Fei and Chinese rhetoric skews the interpretation and motivations of the people.

[Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2008]

M. K. Gandhi: “The Gospel of Non-violence”

[www.mkgandhi.org/nonviolence/index.htm]

Gandhi outlines his reasoning for non-violence.  He explains it is not a position of non-action.  He said, “Nonviolence is the law of the human race and is infintely greater than and superior to brute force.  In the last resort it does not avail to those who do not possess a living faith in the God of Love.”   “Higher Action”

He speaks of his attempts to make his wife “bend to his will.”  But through her example of “determined resistance” and “quiet submission to the suffering” resulted in his shame and “cured” him of his “stupidity.”  He gave up his notions of “ruling over her.”  She was his teacher in the ways of nonviolence.

  Gandhi believed nonviolence was in every religion.  He said, “The non-violence of my conception is more active and more real fighting against wickedness than retaliation whose very nature is to increase wickedness.  I contmplate a mental and , therefore, a moral opposition to immoralities.  I seek entirely to blunt the edge of the tyrant’s sword, not by putting up against it a sharper-edged weapon, but by disappointing his expectation that I would be offering physical resistance.  The resistance of the should that I should offer instead would elude him.  I would first dazzle him, and at last compel recognition from him, which recognition would not humiliate him but would uplift him.”

 Use of contradictions, negations, and affirmations.

Critiqued for Christian thoughts.

 This echoes the U.S. Civil Rights movement.

Anderson, Benedict. “Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.”

There are no grand thinkers of nationalism. 

Anderson’s definition of Nationalism: “it is imagined political community–and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.  It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6).

“Nation is imagined as limited” (7) regardless of its size.

“It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm” (7)

“It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actural inequality and exploitation that my prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradship.  Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (7).

**Cultural Roots of Nationalism.

Hum and Lyon: “Recent Advances in Comparative Rhetoric”

Hum and Lyon discuss the problems of defining and “doing” comparative rhetorics.  It is unlike the same issues with defining and “doing” rhetoric.  “In comparative rhetorics studies scholars have moved beyond the models of Aristotle’s persuasion and Burke’s identification in looking for theoretical bases for analysis” (2).  Most cultures do not fall within this “western” framework.  In addition, Kennedy’s definition of rhetoric is also problematic.  Hum and Lyon suggest a broader definition that accounts for multiple cultures.  This brings in conversations with other scholars such as Mao, Royster, and Lu who look at the position of the “other’s” cultural voice. 

“Translation” of texts and “appropriate methodology” must be considered.  Without the “correct rhetoric tool” scholars and research tend to follow back on the “western” lens for identifying the cultural norms and traditions of the the other.  Translations may not produce the same understandings of that culture, even though there is an attempt to come close to the original.  Language is lacking to meanings. 

**Mao’s “deficiency model” (2003)–nonwestern cultures are evaluated from the “western” understanding.  
**Garrett (1999) “the methodolical paradox.”

 Lu suggests moving beyond the “superficial” understanding of the other culture (10).

Royster suggests, “we have positioned academic discourses in the realm of public discourses, highlighting abstracted, objectified, and dispassionate voices as most valuable” (p.3). This means that scholars are most rewarded for work that silences the specifics of Other’s cultures, meanings, and intentions.  Despite the critiques made again and again, rhetorical scholars are not respected for narrow claims based in specific texts and authors” (13).

 Hum and Lyon:  “If comparative rhetoric is a method of analyzing different discourses, a means of discovering common grounds of engagement and strategy for revealing cultural assumptions, then revisionist readings and the recovery of lost perspectives cannot be separated without the loss of inventive power” (15).

“As we denationalize and denormatlize our notions of rhetoric, we search for understanding the power of communication in an era defined by new communication technologies, increased mobility, displacements of people, and cultural clashes.  To that end, comparative rhetoric is a vital enterprise, but it can only be such if it offers more than a respect of colonial tendencies.  A comparative historical approach, focused on moments, texts, and political situations within cultures would allow us to develop the “shared, interlocutionary dialogic modes of thought and language” that [C. J.] Swearingen (1991) proposed (p. 18)” (17). 

Jurgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.

Introduction: Preliminary Demarcation of a Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere.

Not required reading.  See notes. 

The Analects of Confucius.

Teachings of Confucius. 

Selections:

2.11  The Master said: A person who can bring new warmth to the old while understanding the new is worthy to take as a teacher.

4.8  The Master said, In the morning hear the dao, in the evening die content.

[4.8 Notes: “A famous, unusual, and puzzling passage–puzzling because of the Confucian stress on the dao as an instrument for political action.”] 

4.9  The Master said, If a gentleman sets his heart on the dao but is ashamed to wear poor clothes and eat poor food, he is not worth engaging in serious discussion.

6.19  Men stay alive through straightforward conduct.  When the crooked stay alive it is simply a matter of escaping through luck.

6.21  The Master said, With men of middle level or higher, one may discuss the highest; with men below the middle rank, one may not discuss the highest.

6.23  The Master said, The wise delight in water; the ren delight in mountains.  The wise are in motion; the ren are at rest.  The wise are joyful; the ren are long lived.

6.30  Zigong said, “If one were to bring broad benefits to the people and be able to aid the multitudes, what would you say about him?  Could you call him ren?

The Master said, “Why would you call this matter ren?  Surely, this would be a sage!  Yao and Shun themselves would fall short of this.  The ren person is one who, wishing himself to be settled in position, sets up others; wishing himself to have access to the powerful, achieves access for others.  To be able to proceed by analogy from what lies nearest by, that may be termed the formula for ren.”

8.13  The Master said, Be devoted to faithfulness and love learning; defend the good dao until death.

Do not enter a state in poised in danger; do not remain in a state plunged in chaos.

When the dao prevails in the world, appear; when it does not, hide.

When the doa prevails in a state, to be poor and of low rank is shameful; when the dao does not prevail in a state, to be wealthy and of high rank is shameful

8.16  The Master said, Recklessly bold yet not straightforward, ignorant yet uncompliant, empty headed yet unfaithful, I wish to know nothing of such people.

8.17  The Master said, One should study as though there is not enough time and still feel fear of missing the point.

9.18  The Master said, I have yet to see a man who loved virtue as much as sex.