How Chinese Terms And Concepts Are Developed To Capture Chinese Rhetorical Experiences?

By Author: Mike Jones
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As an example of how Chinese terms and concepts are being discovered and developed to capture Chinese rhetorical experiences, Lu uncovers and puts in dialogue six related terms in classical Chinese to conceptualize and describe speech patterns, persuasive discourse, and rational thinking in ancient China. Through these terms and through her contextualized analysis of them, she creates a situated narrative of ancient Chinese rhetoric that is diverse, polyvalent, and broadly distributed. Similarly, Andy Kirkpatrick studies the Wen Z,e [The Rules of Writing] the first systematic account of Chinese rhetoric by Chen Kui. Instead of resorting to Western rhetorical terms or principles to frame his analysis of Shoes Online the text, Kirkpatrick develops the main principles of Chinese composition and rhetoric by directly appealing to what is laid out both in the text and within the larger historical and cultural context.

As I have described, this methodological turn to the local or to the internally developed cannot stay there forever, and it has to participate in the art of recontextualization. ...
... That is, the rhetorically specific always finds ways to talk back to the "imposed other" be it a Western rhetorical theory, principle, or category and to use it as a frame of reference for comparison or for departure. For example, by appealing to these six Chinese terms, Lu aims not only to capture and conceptualize the ancient Chinese rhetorical activities, but also to compare them, especially ming bian, with the Aristotelian concept of rhetoric. Out of this kind of dialogue can emerge what she calls "a language of ambiguous similarity" that may help us bring together "similar or shared meanings in the conceptualization of rhetoric" and bring out "ambiguity and subtle differences embedded in such similarity". In studying The Rules of Writing, Kirkpatrick demonstrates how Chen Kui relies on textual evidence to formulate the principles of Chinese rhetoric and to support his own rhetorical claims. But Kirkpatrick doesn't stop there. He further demonstrates that Chinese xiuci developed in The Rules of Writing differs from Western rhetoric because it Discount Shoes enjoys a wide range of potential meanings and it is often divided into passive and active rhetoric in modern China.

In fact, we see this kind of dialogic engagement as a constant feature in recent work on Chinese rhetoric. In her study of the modern Chinese writer Lu Yin (1899-193 5) as a feminist rhetorician and social critic, Bo Wang directs our attention to how Lu Yin's vision of nuquanzhuyi (feminism) and her conceptualization of writing led her to deploy redefinition and diary/epistolary fiction as major rhetorical strategies to challenge the sexist discourse and to empower Chinese women at the turn of the twentieth century. What has enabled Wang's study is her readiness to put her work in dialogue with Western feminist rhetorics through a comparative lens, and to specifically draw on extrapolation, a feminist method proposed by Krista Ratcliffe and further developed by other feminist scholars in the field. In the process, Wang helps to disrupt the dualistic categories in gender analysis and recuperate Lu Yin's distinctive rhetorical theories and practices.