Why Should Readers Of College English Be Interested In Chinese Rhetorical Studies?

By Author: linda clinton
Total Articles: 11
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Why should readers of College English be interested in Chinese rhetorical studies? More and more of our students are Chinese or from other Asian cultures that share Chinese traditions. It is still common to profile these students for recognizable "problems": their "misuse" of articles, among other grammatical features; and their unfamiliarity or discomfort with argumentation as a classroom convention and a cultural expectation. Fifteen years ago, as we studied Walter Ong's and Deborah Tannen's characterizations of gendered patterns in rhetoric, a female Chinese student in one of my graduate courses remarked that the "female" patterns defined by Ong and Tannen resembled qualities that Chinese associate with Replica Omega Seamaster being educated and cultivated more generally: deference, politeness, restraint, understatement, indirection, clever evasion of direct confrontation.

Gender and rhetorical theory, rhetorical theory as gendered together present one starting point, one common topic discovered as we correct misconceptions and explore new ...
... directions for research and teaching, with the goal of improving cross-cultural understanding. Graduate and undergraduate students who are recent arrivals, along with second-generation Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans, bring with them histories and practices that we can no longer ignore. In the contact zones of our classrooms, we learn from them as much as we teach them. The essays collected in this issue reflect some of the fruits of that reciprocal learning and teaching, the back-and-forth within rhetoric, a dialectic that is old, very old, in both Eastern and Western traditions. Exploring differences yields new insights into similarities, and vice versa. This common topos is Western in some ways, as in the compare-and-contrast essay, but Eastern as well, if we learn to Omega Speedmaster Replica Watches see yin and yang as variations on the theme of same and different but as complementary opposites, not warring combatants, one of whom must "lose." LuMing Mao's observations suggest how much the Chinese dao, a "way," is much like topos, a "place": in process, a temporary vantage point en route to the next.

I confess that I am one of the not very well-informed, naive Western readers who first encountered the eight-legged essay (baguiven) and thought, eureka! How interesting; here is a paradigm utterly unlike the forms of rhetoric we know. Unlike in several ways: the requirement that the writers artfully assemble the words of others, providing quotations and paraphrases from sages and canonical poets, in addressing an assigned theme that is itself a canonical quotation. No surprises in this writing, except for the artfulness of the excerpting and the symmetry of arriving back at the same place, but knowing more than before about the subtleties in the original "thesis." No agonistic argumentation against an adversary; any proof, or refutation of the opposite point. No expectation of originality or stylistic innovation. No presence of the writer in the text. Now we know better; I know better.