Rhetoric Engaged Literature

By Author: jocelyn
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Barlow's scholarship on the Chinese woman question draws heavily on women's literature and Chinese feminist literary theory (Question of Women; 1 Myself), as does the work of Amy Dooling and Wendy Larson. These scholars' examinations of the historical, social, and cultural impact of women's writing, including Chinese native feminist critiques, have transcended the boundary of literary interpretation understood in the narrow sense of the text largely isolated from the author's writing philosophy. Their recognition of the cultural specifics, in turn, has brought to the fore a vision of international feminism. Barlow concludes, "Once enlightened feminism is recognized to be international, then its depth and multiplicity become clearer. It is significant that the historical flexibility of colloquial Chinese has allowed for so many ways to Replica Tag Heuer Carrera phrase the name feminism or the movement to center female subjects". Inspired by Chinese women's feminist insights, Barlow, Dooling, and Larson show unreserved respect for the feminist writers ...
... they study, without being obstructed by Western methods or conceptualization.

Respect for the other, the second rationale for an enlightened feminist rhetorical theory, helps critics accurately unearth feminist ideas from women's literature. The hope of Barlow and others is that conducting research with responsibility and respect will motivate other feminist critics to incorporate into their research perspectives the woman writer's own feminist philosophy, as well as the specific social or historical context from which her work has evolved. This approach ties rhetoric, feminism, and literary values together, offering multidimensional viewpoints aesthetical, ethical, and sociocultural to strengthen human values reflected in Tag Heuer Replica Watches the true, the good, and the beautiful. In transnational contexts, the enlightened feminist rhetorical theory I propose can encourage critics to respect the other woman's voice without replacing it with theirs for research's sake. This respect naturally makes critics engage rhetoric in literature, consequently enhancing their sensation of artistic expression as well as their sensitivity to the aesthetic values and standards held by the other. Bahri suggests that "we might seek a double session and couple our sense of the purposive purposelessness of art, which is its value and perhaps the most political of all of its purposes, with a more sober awareness of the complete dominance of a market sensibility and the commoditization of all things, including ethics".

The simultaneity of ethics, aesthetics, and politics refrained in the analysis steers it away from misreading the other. Adopting responsibility and respect, the critic can now read a literary text as a rhetorical act. Feminist rhetorical critics fully understand "how a rhetorical act has the potential to teach, to delight, to move, to flatter, to alienate, or to hearten because of its capabilities of discerning the connections among the rhetorical situation, audience, purpose, and strategies embodied in a particular discourse". In these ways, rhetoric has already engaged literature. Rhetorical hermeneutics, to borrow Mailloux's term, moves us beyond interpretations of meanings and aesthetic appreciation to Mark Twain's writing philosophy, the target audience, and the social and cultural impact of the text. Rhetorical analysis delves into the depth of the text that literary theory often fails to fathom. Literary critics have approached Women Warrior from many standpoints feminist, cultural, and historical. Recently, LuMing Mao has suggested that the voice Maxine Hong Kingston has chosen to tell stories may result from hybrid rhetoric, the interlocking tension between Chinese and American rhetorical traditions. What Mailloux and Mao have accomplished is what feminist studies of women's literary rhetoric should aim for: enlightenment "an understanding of the ways symbols can be used by analyzing the ways they were used in a particular time and place and the ways such usage appealed to other human beings"