Reflective Encounters: Illustrating Comparative Rhetoric

TLDR: Contrastive Rhetoric: Contrastive rhetoric as discussed by the authors is the cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the world, which aims to reach and cultivate what may be called a "creative understanding" with another rhetorical tradition and with its new aspects and new semantic depths.

Abstract: Comparative rhetoric, according to George Kennedy, is "the cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the world" (1). A young but promising enterprise, comparative rhetoric aims to reach and cultivate what may be called a "creative understanding" with another rhetorical tradition and with "its new aspects and new semantic depths" (Bakhtin 7). Like any other comparative undertakings, however, comparative rhetoric faces at least two major challenges. One can be characterized as a perennial temptation to resort, in varying degrees of explicitness, to a "deficiency" model--where one particular culture (read as non-Western) is determined to be lacking a concept of rhetoric or, worse still, a rhetorical tradition. And related to this temptation is a desire, largely based on one dominant (read as Western) rhetorical system, to identify some "rhetorical universals" across discourse and across culture in spite of the multifaceted, contextually diverse nature of rhetoric. (1) The other challenge has to do with what Mary Garrett calls "a methodological paradox" ("Some" 54): to study another rhetorical tradition for purposes of comparison, one must start somewhere, most frequently with a set of principles or concepts external to the culture (but familiar to the researcher). On the other hand, there always remains the danger of imposing these principles or concepts, however inadvertently, on that other tradition and creating a forced fit or dissonance as a result of such imposition. In this essay, I will construct a brief history of this young discipline of "comparative rhetoric" and of its divergent responses to these two challenges. While developing this narrative, I will focus on representative works that have appeared over the past forty-some years. I will discuss the advances that have so far been made, and tease out, whenever appropriate, the logic of Orientalism that has also stifled many comparative undertakings. I will close this essay by exploring an "etic/emic" approach--one that will better meet these two challenges and that will yield what I call "reflective encounters" where different rhetorical traditions can truly converse with and learn from each other. (2) In 1966, Robert Kaplan, in "Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education," analyzed the organization of individual paragraphs in approximately six hundred compositions by ESL (English as Second Language) students and sought to identify rhetorical differences in their writings to contrast with rhetorical characteristics in English paragraph development. His essay thus pioneered an area of study that is now known as "contrastive rhetoric." Altogether he identified five types of paragraph development for five cultural groups, and each type reflects a corresponding culture's thought patterns. For example, paragraph development in Anglo-European expository writing follows a linear path, whereas speakers of Semitic languages construct paragraphs based on a complex series of parallel constructions. Oriental writing, on the other hand, can be characterized by an indirect approach as its paragraphs are "turning and turning in a widening gyre" (10). In Romance languages and in Russian, paragraphs allow for a degree of digressiveness--one that could be overbearing to a writer of English. Since the publication of this seminal essay, many studies have appeared that focus on discourse patterns across cultures--patterns that may intrude upon ESL students' effort to write in English. As expected, these studies have also criticized Kaplan's essay because it privileges the native English speakers (Matalene); because it lumps Chinese, Thai, and Korean speakers in one "Oriental" group (Hinds); and because it conflates rhetorical patterns with thought patterns (Severino). And Kaplan himself has since modified some of the claims made in the 1966 essay ("Cultural Thought Patterns Revisited," "Foreword"). …