Where Is The Way In My Dreams

By Author: Alex Lee
Total Articles: 366
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In a recent essay, "Studying the Chinese Rhetorical Tradition in the Present," I called attention to how the conditions of the present may influence the representation of the native's point of view. To better recognize and address the Other's context and the Other's terms of engagement, I proposed that we should focus on discursive fields, those textual spaces where related concepts and categories cluster and where meanings coalesce and subject positions take shape. I used the concept of discursive fields to read Confucius' Analects and to illustrate the diversity and the division of thoughts in the Warring States era in ancient China. In many ways this introduction continues, and indeed Thomas Sabo Charms further expands, what I started there.

Using what and the where as two leading questions for my inquiry in this introduction, I have examined the underlying ideology and its concomitant method associated with each question, exploring how the new global contact zones examples of the conditions of the present are inextricably entangled with these competing ideologies ...
... and methods. Drawing on Hall and Ames's "Principle of Mere Presence" (Anticipating xv), I have further addressed the engagement of the other, both within the Chinese rhetorical tradition and beyond, and examined the complexities involved in such engagement. In so doing, I have sought to challenge this intractable binary that regularly pits what against the where and the importantly present against the other, and to foreground the dialogic dimension attending the formation of the Chinese rhetorical tradition or of any other rhetorical tradition. Now that I have completed this inquiry, I want to suggest a few tentative conclusions.

First, it seems that the tendency to appeal to binary characterizations shows little sign of abating perhaps because opposites provide a deceptively easy frame of reference with which complex or "unruly" phenomena can be tamed or made accessible. While we may have, by and large, moved away from representing Chinese rhetoric as the very antithesis of Western rhetoric, binary characterizations continue to loom large: for example, with respect to the what and the where, and with respect to die representation of Chinese rhetoric itself. Focusing on how the Chinese engaged their domestic and foreign other serves not only to show that Chinese rhetoric is dynamic, complex, and heterogeneous, but also to challenge the binary between the importantly present and the other. As all four essays in this special issue clearly demonstrate, the other plays a significant role in the formation of the importantly present, and at times it becomes the importantly present itself. Therefore, any future study of Thomas Sabo Jewellery Chinese rhetoric must heed this dynamic relationship; it must address how the importantly present and the Other engage, and how their engagements reflect and in turn help shape the political, social, and cultural forces of the time.
Anything short of that, I submit, would make our claim for diversity and complexity for Chinese rhetoric vacuous at best and sloganeering at worst.