The Study Of Chinese Rhetoric

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Similarly, in her recent study of the prominent third-century BCE Legalist Han Fei, Lyon deftly moves between Anglo-American speech act theory represented by J. L. Austin and Kenneth Burke and her careful, situated reading of Han Fei's writing. Through his writing, Han Fei exerted a great deal of influence on the political life of his time, preparing the ruler for "the transition from chaotic feudal China to Legalist China as the embrace of stability through traditional law". By applying this dialogic approach to her analysis, Lyon offers us a significantly different understanding of persuasion and of Shoes Online the relationship between speaker and audience, between individual subjects and the state, and between speech and act. Further, she draws on her analysis of three speech acts in Han Fei's writing legal, "non-action" type, and rhetorical to reflect on and complicate speech act theory seen through Austin and Burke.

Consequently, this kind of recontextualization makes us attend more to the ideologies and their corresponding methods, and to how they may influence or ...
... even determine the study of Chinese rhetoric. After all, where we are and where we have been intruding upon what we do and how we do it, irrespective of our own awareness. They affect not only our own words and deeds, but also those of others we either identify with or disassociate from, as we make our positions known and felt. An awareness of this dynamic helps foster, drawing from Ratcliffe's concept of rhetorical listening, "a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture" and "to cultivate conscious identifications in ways that promote productive communication, especially but not solely cross-culturally". In turn, we become more responsible for what we do with words, for how we use them, and, above all, for their inevitable consequences.

Let me say a word more on the last point. To respond to the underlying assumptions associated with the "where" question, we use locally motivated rhetorical and linguistic categories to describe the where's of Chinese rhetoric, and we further put them in dialogue with, rather than holding them up to, what's of Western rhetoric. As we openly identify with Discount Shoes our own interpretive actions that challenge and put pressure on the existing rhetorical hierarchy, we can become more attuned to, and thus more accountable for, our own narrative and its own hierarchical structure or internal conflict and heterogeneity. In other words, as we exercise our agency to develop a new rhetorical order using Chinese rhetoric as a specific case in point, we must recognize and own up to its processional, often heterogeneous, voices. And we must be prepared to interrogate our own authority and legitimacy even as we attempt to confer validity and credibility on our representation or construction of Chinese rhetoric. In short, the art of recontextualization also entails an ethical imperative.