In this article, Xing Lu describes the evolution of comparative rhetoric in rhetorical studies between Chinese rhetoric and Western rhetoric as has having occurred in four stages: deficiency stage, recognition/emergence stage, the native/emic stage, and the appreciation/appropriation stage. According to Lu, the during the deficiency stage, arguments about Chinese rhetorics are premised on the lack [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘comparative rhetorics’
January 2, 2009
Lu, Xing. “Studies and Development of Comparative Rhetoric in the U.S. A.: Chinese and Western Rhetoric in Focus”
January 2, 2009
Wang, Bo. “A Survey of Research in Asian Rhetoric”
In order to survey the existing state of research in Asian rhetorics, in this article, Bo Wang interviews top scholars in Asian rhetorics, who have recently begun to study Asian rhetorics on their own terms and in their own contexts and helped to broaden our modern conceptions of rhetoric. Included in this survey are the [...]
March 27, 2008
Mao, LuMing “Reflective Encounters: Illustrating Comparative Rhetoric”
Mao’s Reflective Encounter’s begins with three challenges that comparative rhetoric as defined by Kennedy faces: temptation of resorting to the defiency mode, identifying “rhetorical universals” across cultures and imposing principles from Western classical rhetoric onto other cultural rhetorical practices. Mao offers a brief history of comparative rhetoric as subdiscipline in our field and fleshes out [...]
February 14, 2008
Culture in Ancient India and china by Robert Oliver—Chapter 1: Culture and Rhetoric
In Chapter 1 of Communication and Culture in Ancient India and china, Robert Oliver attempts to explain the manner in which these cultures talked–”how they addressed one another, under what circumstances, on what topics, in what varied styles, with what intent, and with what effects” (3)–as expressed in communication theories articulated in classical philosophies and [...]
February 7, 2008
George Kennedy “Comparative Rhetoric”
In Comparative Rhetoric, George Kennedy offers an evolutionary model of rhetoric, beginning with animals, moving in chronological time to “non-literate” cultures, or “societies without writing,” and ending with ancient ‘literate” societies, the apex of which is ancient Greece and Rome. Relying on histories largely constructed by white historians, in this part of his book, Kennedy [...]
November 12, 2007
Chapter 3 of David Halperin’s “How to do the History of Homosexuality”—“Historicizing the Subject of Desire”
In this chapter, Halperin clarifies misinterpretations of Foucault’s arguments on the discourse of sexuality, and then compares his own interpretation of the pseudo-Lucianic ancient text titled Erotes to modern discourses of sexuality. In the process, Halperin affirms Foucault’s argument that sexuality is a historical apparatus that produces historically specific forms of subjectivity, which in and [...]
October 10, 2007
Chapter 5: “Ties that Bind: A Comparative Analysis of Zora Neal Hurston’s and Geneva Smitherman’s Work” by Kimmika L. H. Williams
In this chapter, Williams analyzes the similar rhetorical features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) that Hurston and Smitherman identified in their research nearly forty years apart form one another and situates them within African American Rhetoric(s) (AAR). Their findings, Willliams points out, are consistent with several prevailing theories in AAVE:
• Language spoken by [...]
June 20, 2007
“Seeing Ancient Rhetoric, Easily at a Glance” James Fredal
In this article, Fredal, utimately concerned with limiting definitions of rhetoric for our postmodern world, defines rhetoric as “the exchange of meaning within a social system through which meaning, culture, identity, knowledge and practice are produced and circulated” (183). In defining rhetoric in this way, Fredal hopes to create a definition broad enough to encompass [...]
