Discussion on 1/26: Toward a Theory of "Author-Audience"

Dear Folks,

As promised, a placeholder for our notes in progress from Tuesday, Jan. 26.

See you next week,
-Dr. Graban

Mapping Global Rhetorics

As Travis mentioned in his post, our concept map veered more into the conceptual than the visual. We decided to create a map that allowed us to think more about the ways in which historiography was done, but felt that most of our readings could be classified as comparative or historical. However, many readings certainly stretched across both categories. As we made our map, we thought it would be interesting to map the locations discussed in the readings along with the physical locations of the authors themselves.

With the exception of Richard Enos, all of the authors and scholars mentioned in the readings were completely new to me. I was curious to see if the comparative rhetoric we had read so far was primarily originating in the US looking outward, or less centralized. Seeing Meghan and Stephanie’s map and then reading their reflections made me more aware of the rhetoric and composition programs around the world—but as Stephanie posted, there were difficulties finding many of these international programs. This made me wonder where exactly comparative rhetoric is being done—Dr. Graban pointed out the distinction between intercultural and international—does it matter if we’re doing intercultural work rather than international?

If we were to revise our map, I think we could add more detailed information about the connections between authors and subjects. While it was interesting to note that most of the authors, with the exception of Smith, were currently working at American universities, I think knowing more specifically which scholars (and how many) were studying different rhetorical traditions would be fascinating. The readings for these two weeks have addressed with differing approaches Hesford’s goal to “identify the emergent trends in these interlocking fields, paying particular attention to the methodological challenges we face as we turn towards the global” (788).

She advocates for greater “coalition-building” across the humanities, but I was left wondering, exactly to what end? Obviously, reexamining the ways comparative rhetoricians “take for granted the nation-state and citizen-subject as units of analysis and ignore the global forces shaping individual lives and literate practices” addresses in part Smith’s concerns on the colonizing influence of academic study of indigenous people and cultures.

When trying to place the different comparative rhetorical study in our map, there seemed some significantly different approaches—when outlining the potential questions his research could address, Kennedy hopes for a “general theory of rhetoric that will apply in all societies” (Kennedy 1). By arguing for a rhetoric present even in nonhuman actors, Kennedy’s work addresses that general theory. While considering rhetoric as “a form of energy that drives and is imparted to communication” definitely broadly redefines my own understanding of rhetoric, the idea that we can find a “general theory” for rhetorics across the globe has troubling implications (Kennedy 215). Such a theory is appealing, but would it essentialize?

Mao gets to this problem in Aristotelian-style, Western approach to examining the rhetoric of other cultures. He argues, “the central question to ask is not “What is rhetoric in/for these other cultures?” but “What does the other do in/with rhetoric, and how does the other do it?”” (Mao 450). I think one way we can do this is through rhetorical hermeneutics—the type of historiography that, as Mailloux argues, focuses on the context in addition to the primary text in an attempt to “do” history. Our small group in class brought up the relative benefits and difficulties of working with translation when we discussed Arabic rhetoric as defined by Al-Musawi and Borrowman.  Concluding this blog post, I’m realizing that I’m still left with more questions than answers when it comes to how we do comparative rhetorics. But I think that’s okay—I’m looking forward to see how that changes this semester. 

Comparative Rhetoric from the Perspective of the West

Dear Class,

I tried - I really did - to "map global rhetorics." I loved the description of these exploratories as "playing," and I wanted nothing more than to "play." But, like Meghan, my mind does not work best conceptualizing spatially and this fact turned this exploratory into, really, a very difficult task.

I initially attempted to rely on our readings for ideas of how to map "global rhetorics" - and I couldn't. I parsed through Kennedy's chapter in Comparative Rhetoric on rhetoric in Greece and Rome, intently noting that the development of metaphor seemed to lag a bit in Greece, whereas in the Chinese Book of Songs and the Vedic hymns in India, metaphor dominated. (Kennedy, "Metaphor in Greek Literature"). I didn't only want to map differences in the development of rhetoric across the world; I also wanted to map similarities, and took special note of Hesiod's Works and Days in Greece and how it could be viewed as a counterpart to the "wisdom literature" in Egypt and the Near East. (Kennedy, "Rhetoric in Hesiod's Works and Days").

But I kept plotting points which I differentiated by color because one geographic area might have a rhetorical similarity like the use of metaphor to another country, but, on the next page, I would find another work in that geographic area which avoided the use of metaphor.

Then I started reading Borrowman's Recovering the Arabic Aristotle, and I began questioning: do any sorts of patterns actually exist in rhetoric globally or across cultures? Am I forcing these patterns to fit my perspective? Am I focusing only on one aspect of rhetoric to the detriment of other aspects because that is how I have learned is the "correct" way to organize and compartmentalize? Is there a way for me to compare rhetorics across the world without compartmentalizing in this way that I've learned to compartmentalize - in other words, without comparing everything from my standpoint?

When comparing across cultures, am I ignoring the seventh and eighth books? (Borrowman 105). In my conscious efforts to compare and contrast my own rhetoric with those around the world, am I silencing the indigenous voices I wish to encourage? (Smith 21). Is it truly possible for rhetoric to "transform dominant rhetorical traditions and paradigms," to "challenge the prevailing power imbalances and patterns of knowledge production?" (Mao 448).

Without a clear understanding from the reading of how these emerging rhetorics might have affected one another, I did not feel comfortable "mapping" those trends - in fact, I could not even begin to comprehend what those trends were, or if there even were trends in the first place.

Thus, I resorted with Meghan to a more literal map of the location of opportunities to study global rhetoric. And this. Was. Hard.

I mean, as I noted in class, there really are NOT that many opportunities outside of the United States to study global rhetorics (unless, of course, I'm searching under some incorrect terminology). I literally could find very few programs studying rhetoric, much less rhetoric with a global slant.

As possible to see from our map, a majority of non-U.S. study of global rhetorics is centered in Europe. Spain, France, Poland, Italy. There are a few sites in Mexico, one in Thailand, one in South Korea. But, truly, a majority of the programs are centered in Europe, where Western classical rhetoric dominates.

Add this to the research Meghan did which brought to my attention the Peace Corps Master's International program in Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture at Michigan Tech. That program teaches Corps members "how to share language skills and health information with the people who need them most," and offers four concentrations - Secondary English Teaching, Secondary English Teacher Training, University English Teaching, and Health Extension (http://www.mtu.edu/peacecorps/programs/rtc/).

Look at all the little red squares which represent where Peace Corps members are sent after gaining this training. A majority of these sites are in Africa and South America, with a splattering in Eastern Europe and more remote areas like Papua New Guinea.

Interesting how this is all a circle then, isn't it? The Western institutions teach rhetoric and then send students to the areas which, in Westerners minds, have been known as homes to the more "primitive." (Smith 25). I believe my thoughts were more eloquently stated by Smith: "There is also, amongst indigenous academics, the sneaking suspicion that the fashion of post-colonialism has become a strategy for reinscribing or reauthorizing the privileges of non-indigenous academics because the field of post-colonial' discourse has been defined in ways which can still leave out indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our current concerns." (Smith 25).

Like Smith, I am concerned that the field of global rhetorics, with its well-meant intentions, might actually just be contributing to imperialism and colonialism because how can scholars look past their own viewpoints when comparing another culture's rhetoric with their own? (I believe Mikaela also asked this question in her response as well). 

As noted by Sean, "A language of similarity does not access what lies beyond similitude. That is, by using a method focused on similar linguistic terms, rhetoricians are limited in what they see and remain too mired in the presence and absence of Western concepts." (Lyon 177).

Location, Location, Location

Compared to the other two groups, Stephanie’s and my map didn’t place the readings’ objects of study as much as it focused on pinpointing geographic locations that represent global sites ofrhetorical study.  Unlike Travis and Sean, I’m not a visio-spatial thinker at all (as those who’ve had the misfortune of working with me on concept map activities in other seminars well know). Since I find representing a spatial relationship between abstract concepts very difficult, the task of finding “where things are” was somewhat limited in my capacity to working within the already-established boundaries of nations and cities. Even as it may have been rooted in some of my own limitations, the method behind this decision remains rooted in the methodological and epistemological concerns of authors like Hesford, Mao, and Borrowman, and constructing the map was, I think, a useful exercise in allowing me to think about how and why location matters.

Our map took some cues from Hesford, drawing on her goal to “identify emergent trends” in rhetoric and composition so as to “argue for greater cross-reading, collaboration, and coalition building across the humanities” (788). In some ways, I think Hesford’s goal carried over into ours when Stephanie and I constructed our map. Plotting the international sites of formal study in rhetoric and communication is a crucial first step in identifying trends in that formal study; once we know where rhetorical education is happening, we can start to examine the kinds of study taking place. Looking outward to international sites of study, and listening (rhetorically) to the conversations taking place at those institutions, can help us to avoid retreating into our “disciplinary homelands” (Hesford 789). Like Travis, I at times found Hesford’s study a bit too focused on the different sources with which she was working, and the amount of examples she called on got a bit overwhelming. Thus, I think one goal of our map was to pull back a bit and focus on one question (although, as the map demonstrates, we too found numerous examples of differing kinds).

Hesford’s other goal of cross-reading and collaboration factored into our map, as well. We found multiple examples of institutional partnerships fostering international rhetorical study:  the global rhetoric courses offered by the Wallenberg Global Learning Network; the collaborative Argupolis doctoral program in Europe; and Michigan Tech’s partnership with the Peace Corps. If Hesford’s primary aim is to call for increased collaboration and encourage outward-reaching disciplinary study, then programs like these seem to be somewhat in line with that aim.

Ultimately, our map begins to answer the question of where formal study of rhetoric is taking place internationally, but it also leads to questions about that formal study proceeds. In this sense, our map invites Mao’s question: “What does the other do/in with [the study of] rhetoric, and how does the other do it?” (450). Which traditions are taught in these programs? Which works emphasized? How does advanced study of rhetoric proceed? Along similar lines, Borrowman’s emphasis on the potential for translation to form the basis of a rhetorical tradition has intrigued me. While undoubtedly, some of the programs we highlighted on our map will be taught in English, each translation of the same work carries with it the values and practices of the target language’s culture. Borrowman provides examples of this type of carrying over by pointing out that Ibn Rushd’s use of metaphors and imagery come from Arabic, rather than Greek, culture (111), and that the characterization of poetry as a type of syllogism is “a radical departure from the Aristotelian text” (107).

 Translation theory may be helpful here in understanding these alterations not as radical, but as a somewhat inherent aspect of bringing together two languages, and by extension cultures, in the same text. At least in the time period Borrowman is studying, translation was, in Nietzsche’s terms, something akin to an act of conquest; Hugo Friedrich similarly argues that “translation meant transformation in order to mold the foreign into the linguistic structures of one’s own culture” (12)*. More recently, translation has aimed to bring the reader toward the writer, purposefully maintaining the “foreignness” of the original text (Schleiermacher 46).  Regardless of the strategy used in presenting translated texts to students of rhetoric, there exists the potential for “open[ing] ourselves to how other traditions and cultures use and experience language and other symbolic means” (Mao 449). By identifying international sites of rhetorical study, we can begin to look at that study in context, resisting the Euro-American centrism Mao cautions against. Of course, as the locations of standalone rhetoric programs on our map reveals, it was difficult to find lists or names of programs outside of Europe. In this sense, even though we did not include standalone programs in the U.S., the limitations of search results caused us to somewhat fail in answering Mao’s call. Nonetheless, this map represents a start in considering the conversations taking place outside of our disciplinary and national borders. 



*The Friedrich and Schleiermacher pieces both come from an anthology called Theories of Translation, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet and published by U of Chicago Press.

Assumptions About Regions and Rhetoric

          The Mapping "Global Rhetorics" assignment was somewhat confusing for me. As my group looked over the readings (Kennedy, Borrowman, Lyon, and Al-Musawi), we started to see how the focus of rhetoric was different for different regions. Recognizing regional focus of rhetoric brought up several questions, but the one that stood out the most for me was: Do different regions have distinct canons for rhetoric?
          At first, it seemed pretty straightforward. Different regions have different cultures, so it seemed that rhetoric would follow suit. We mapped out the regions we wanted to focus on. Greece, Egypt, the Arabic Middle East, and China stood out from the readings, and they are the focal points on our map. Each region corresponds to a central focus of rhetoric. We found Greece was focused on persuasion; Egypt, eloquence; the Arabic Middle East, hermeneutics; and China, remonstration.

How did we come to these conclusions (or maybe it's better to refer to them as assumptions)? 

*To keep things brief, I will only show one reference from each text that brought us to an assumption.*

          The first two assumptions came from the reading of George A. Kennedy's Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction.  For Greece: Kennedy says, "A common brief definition of 'rhetoric'...was 'the art of persuasion,' or...'an ability, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion'" (Kennedy 3). For Egypt: Kennedy says, "Egyptian writers often celebrated eloquence," and goes on to say, "Several registers of formal language are found in Egyptian texts" (Kennedy 138). We argued that these were the main points for rhetoric in those two regions, because they were referred to frequently within the text and seemed to be at least Kennedy's focus towards those regions.
          For me (I cannot speak for my partners, because they read more of Shane Borrowman's "Recovering the Arabic Aristotle" than I did), the assumption of the Arabic Middle East's focus on hermeneutics for rhetoric came from Al-Musawi's reference to "Arabic Rhetoric". Specifically, it comes from this quote: "'from the art of making speeches into the art of following discourses with understanding, which means into hermeneutics," which is in reference to the "Qur'anic exegisis" of Arabic rhetoric (Al-Musawi 30). Also, our assumption towards Chinese rhetoric came from Carol S. Lipson and Roberta Binkley's Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics (where I would go into more explanation, but I am running out of time to post this blog).

Now, for the question: "Do different regions have distinct canons for rhetoric?" 

          I personally looked to Kennedy to help find some evidence (for or against) the possibility of canons for each region. Kennedy's prologue in Comparative Rhetoric provides a detailed description of Greco-Roman rhetoric (or traditional Western rhetoric) and breaks it down into parts, including the canons: "invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery" (Kennedy 6). Kennedy later talks about Egypt and mentions the "earliest known rhetorical handbook", which "[set] out canons of silence, choosing the right moment to speak, facility, restraint, and truthfulness" (Kennedy 138). There is a lot more to Kennedy's Comparative Rhetoric that the class was not assigned to read, so I cannot be certain that he does or does not map out some sort of canons for other regions/countries.
          I did try to formulate canons for Mesopotamia, which Kennedy talks about in Chapter 6: "Literacy and Rhetoric in the Ancient Near East" of Comparative Rhetoric. I mapped out what I thought were the most important points of rhetoric for Mesopotamia [and my partners traced possible canons for other regions  (Reference Sheet - Exploratory 1 Notes )], but my trace led me in a direction I did not expect to go; my tracing of "canons" felt more like an assumption I was making about a region that I knew little about.
          I was basing my assumption on Kennedy's text, where he in no way established canons for Mesopotamia. It complicated things for me. It made me think that rhetoric could not be separated by region based on canonical differences, that maybe making canons for rhetoric is not the way to describe how rhetoric works. Maybe all rhetoric is associated with the principles of the Dao and cannot be defined. Maybe rhetoric is "energy" (Kennedy 3), and it is more complicating to define than what canons can offer. Maybe canons are a product of our own "side of the looking-glass," which Arabella Lyon references from I.A. Richards on Page 176 of Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics.

Works Cited:

Al-Musawi, Muhsin J. “Arabic Rhetoric.” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. Thomas O. Sloane. New York: Oxford UP, 29-33. Print.

Kennedy, George A. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Excerpts. Print.

Classical Rhetoric and Other Misnomers

Intersections and divergences in culture have always been of assiduous interest to me. As such, I was intrigued and daunted by the prospect of creating a geographical map that would specifically locate those points of divergence. I have always struggled with spatial processing and things with names like “map,” “chart,” or “graph. However, once I began to look closely at the readings it seemed nearly impossible to track the cultural movements of rhetorical information any other way. I have a habit of trying to sum up the totality of humanity in every assignment, as previous professors have said, so I struggled to refine my ideas about the material into manageable categories.

Sean, Andrew and I began by trying to compile the breadth of what we read into a comprehensive map that showed the spread of rhetorical theory. Initially we talked through questions and observations we collected through our individual readings of the texts and tried to hone in on the places where we agreed and those where we disagreed. We somehow each settled on a different text as our point of identification and operated from those standpoints, Andrew with Kennedy, Sean with Smith and myself with Lyon. This division of interest proved advantageous for our discussion because it allowed us to (figuratively) assume the roles of each theorist. From this vantage point we began to identify specific themes that were present in the texts. One theme that permeated all of the readings we considered was language. In dissimilar but related forms, language was the connecting factor that linked each author’s intent.

Linda Tuhewai Smith places special emphasis on language and the importance of naming as an imperial act, “Columbus names that legacy more than any other individual” (Smith 21).  Smith traces the path of colonization and making note of the points in history when names have been used to privilege certain groups or events over others. It was this process, combined with my predilections for the philological, that peaked my interest in language as a means of power and division. Smith explains the process of de-humanization employed by colonizing parties, one aspect of which was the propagation of titles like “savage”. This word allowed the colonizers to treat the indigenous as sub-human. “One of the supposed characteristics of primitive peoples was that we could not use our minds or intellects…we did not practice the arts of civilization. By lacking such virtues we disqualified ourselves, not just from civilization but from humanity itself” (Smith 26).

Arabella Lyon considered language more in terms of the inherent limitations of specific cultural vocabulary. Smith posits that many cultural aspects of particular people are dictated by the phonetic or ideographic classification of a language. We found a three-part example of this lingual facet (though many other existed); the first was Lu Ming Mao’s Facts of Non-Use (how something is rather than what it is), the second was Smith’s explanation of the Daoist notion of wuwei or non-act, and the third was Gilbert Ryle’s anatomy of verbs (terminus verbs/process verbs) from Lyon’s text. We chose to take the Daoist words from Lyon’s text and plot them on a Google map in a cluster. We designed the map to resemble a mirror to symbolize Richards Mirror (Lyon). Within the looking glass we filled in our visual representations of other rhetorical tropes, the “crack” in the glass (a crooked line running from the Middle East down the Near East) represented the Western divide. We then drew lines from different points across the Middle and Near East, over the West, to the Far East. We labeled the lines with words that encapsulated the prominent themes in the texts i.e. persuasion, remonstration, eloquence, hermeneutics, fluidity and timeliness. Our intention with this method was to demonstrate the importance of language by establishing its limitations in our project. These restrictive terms forced artificial boundaries within our map, similar to those forced on those who try to write about their cultural experience.

From this wide range of lingual interpretation we moved toward a more geographically focused discussion of language. For this we drew on Shane Borrowman’s Recovering the Arabic Aristotle. Borrowman’s book makes a persuasive argument for the Middle Eastern influence on the Western Aristotle. “I argue that the Aristotle that entered the intellectual life of Europe was fundamentally different from the Aristotle now studied by scholars of rhetoric” (Borrowman 99). We deduced from Borrowman’s ideas about the “Arabic Aristotle” that there was a trend of theories and texts passing through the Middle East before they could travel from the West to the Far East and vice versa. This theory gave us the idea to plot our map with lines that did not have an arrow on one side that would indicate singular direction. The lines symbolize continuous passage, demonstrating the itinerant nature of information. Our ultimate, and largely unfulfilled, goal in this assignment was to boil down everything we read and locate specific cannons of rhetoric for each culture. However it soon became clear that there was no way to canonize these rhetoric’s in such concrete terms. The futility of the exercise reminded me of the way Lyon describes the Dao, “in Daoism, there is not cosmic unity, only process and becoming” (Lyon 186). Similarly comparative rhetoric cannot be pinned down by incomplete terminology of one or any language. Kennedy broaches this subject in his introduction, “Rhetoric, in essence, is a form of mental and emotion all energy” (Kennedy 3). In positing that rhetoric is a natural, ethereal force it is impossible to place it firmly anywhere, its like trying to decide which culture invented wind or laughter.

It was something of a happy accident that the mapping technology was archaic. That drawback offered an interactive example of the limitations faced by rhetoricians. As Kastely states, “we are inescapably placed”, rooted unshakably in the place where our cultural ties lie. The notion that there could be a way to look beyond the figurative looking glass seems to hold an idealistic romanticism, rooted in its unattainability. However after considering the theorists that make up global rhetoric individually it seems as though the simple act of grappling with the veritable impossibility of looking beyond the screen, to consider things in Burkean terms, of ones own situation begs the potentiality progress. I have always considered an effective text one that leaves the reader with more questions than answers. After reading and unpacking these texts I feel far less sure of what I thought I knew and more aware of the inconsistencies of language, history, privilege, and cultural connectivity. Even if Kastely is right and we are “inescapably placed” I think there is a legitimate case to be made for the necessity of locating ones placement in the world and understanding that the view from that place is unique, limited and (should be) unprivileged.

Breaking the Glass; Building a Pool

During the summer before my matriculation into Florida State’s graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition, I had received a challenge from an English professor to expand an essay I had written in class into a full article. Unfazed by the sheer impossibility of the task, I set to work, reading theoretical pieces from Foucault and an introduction to the theoretical concept of Spatiality presented in Robert T. Tally’s book Spatiality. As the field of Literary and Cultural Studies has shifted to purport the significance of colonized and decolonized voices, Tally notes, there has been an accompanying shift toward better understanding the spaces that authors construct, name, and portray—through both their mimetic and diegetic devices.

Thus, the task of “Mapping Global Rhetorics” fell well within my academic interests. It is also a task that we do more than we realize in our everyday reading and writing, for, as Tally and other spatial theorists assert, writing should be seen as “a form of mapping or a cartographic activity,” wherein a “writer must establish the scale and the shape, no less of the narrative than of the places in it” (45). When we read, we take cues from authors and rhetors, constructing landscapes, cityscapes, and their inhabitants in our minds: “If writers map the real and imagined spaces of their world in various ways through literary means, then it follows that readers are also engaged in this broader mapping project” (79). Therefore, as I read the pieces for this class, pieces which introduced me to unfamiliar concepts and locations, I naturally began to form a map in my mind, well before I produced this map with my group.

The selection that most significantly informed my group’s mapping practice, though, was Arabella Lyon’s “‘Why do the Rulers Listen to the Wild Theories of Speech-Makers?” Or Wuwei, Shi, and Methods of Comparative Rhetoric.” We were most intrigued by Lyon’s mapping project she presented in her chapter, starting and ending with the frame of I.A. Richards’ “mirror of the mind” metaphor. To introduce his concept, Richards starts by asking a simple yet extremely complex question: “Can we in attempting to understand and translate a work which belongs to a very different tradition from our own do more than read our own conceptions into it?” (From Lyon 176). Our map, then, featured Richards’ mirror of the mind as its own frame, but this mirror (hopefully) did not merely reflect our Western ideas and traditions back at us. We instead created fragmentations, through a historiographical approach to understanding and mapping terms and concepts that projected a “movement beyond a New Critical translation of terms into a historical placement of ideas,” which “breaks the looking-glass into smaller pieces and forces the Western spectator to study harder in attempting to see a whole” (193).

Thus, the definitions of rhetoric that we saw emerging from each disparate location cut fissures into our looking-glass, breaking our “perfect” Western image, an image which seeks to appropriate other forms and subsume them into one, uniform discourse. Our “goal” for this map was to, through working with Richards’ metaphor, create a pool of discourse that rhetoricians can pull from to communicate in different ways in all situations. In order for our map to present an accurate representation of rhetorical traditions and concepts though, we had to recognize the Western Terministic Screen, the jagged fissure that runs vertically through the glass. While many Rhetorical traditions of the Middle and Near East seemed to correspond (and I use that word recognizing the problems associated with it) to ideas and traditions held in the West, many of the ideas from the Far East did not. Thus, ideas and traditions seemed to be able to move from the Middle and Near East to the West, but ideas from the Far East could not as easily cross the “Western Divide.”

Western theorists and historians have often dichotomized the East and the West in detrimental ways, and Smith notes the fallacious nature of this practice as “Said has argued that the ‘oriental’ was partially a creation of the West, based on a combination of images formed through scholarly and imaginative works” (27). For a time, especially within Literature and Music, the West heavily fetishized the “Oriental,” creating their own compositions that emulated “the other’s” style. These were largely misappropriations and misrepresentations, what Lyon might assert to be compositions which create merely a language of similarity. “A language of similarity,” according to Lyon, “does not access what lies beyond similitude. That is, by using a method focused on similar linguistic terms, rhetoricians are limited in what they see and remain too mired in the presence and absence of Western concepts” (177). In the placing of terms and ideas from the rhetoric of the Far East along the Western Divide, it was hard for us, then, not to approach it from a scheme of categorization based upon similitude. Ideas that could potentially cross the line did, but we did not want them to fully reach the West because we recognized that translation and correspondence alone were not substantive enough criteria to assert any stable connection between the rhetorical ideas and traditions of the East and the West. The divide, then, did represent a Terministic Screen, or a semi-permeable membrane, allowing some concepts through, but not all of them.

So, I wouldn’t say that we necessarily reached our goal of creating a pool of rhetorical discourse through our map, but I think our map showed us the limitations we face as Westerners when attempting to map and orient ourselves within other rhetorical traditions. Fracturing the mirrors in our minds is the first step to seeing the problems we face, but we have to do much more. In our own map, a problem we definitely ran into was our reductive language. We systematically reduced whole, complex traditions to one word in order to be able to plot coordinates on our map. The kind of historiographical mapping we engaged in could, then, have been deemed one framed by totalizing discourse, which Smith defines in this way: “The concept of totality assumes the possibility and the desirability of being able to include absolutely all known knowledge into a coherent whole” (31). Thus, as we continue to approach the concept of doing Global Rhetorics, we need to carefully assess each proposed method of practice to determine their benefits and detriments. As Travis notes, Lyon shows us how to potentially approach Eastern ideas as Westerners, but she never gives us clear examples that show how Eastern ideas, when placed into a healthy assemblage with those of the West, can transform or even augment our Western conception of rhetoric.

Notes on Method, Questions Toward Synthesis

Shaped by the terministic screen of graduate coursework in rhetoric and composition, it never occurred to me that we’d be asked to create a geographic map. Already having been a visio-spatial thinker before grad school, concept mapping has become an integral process of my thinking and a tool I incorporate into my composition classes. As such, the geographic elements of our map were understated when compared to the conceptual work that Ashley and I did. In our concept mapping, we thought about our readings thus far in terms of two different philosophies of global rhetoric, the historical and the comparative. As I said in class last night, these categories were somewhat arbitrary, but at least premised on the overarching approaches Dr. Graban mentioned in our first meeting. While the divisions seemed neat on our map, I indicated that I could see how these divisions might start to break down if we pushed some readings too hard in one direction or the other. I’d like to begin by quickly talking through how we placed the readings where we did, and then break down those categories to show how Lyon is working within a space between the comparative and historical approach to global rhetoric, and doing it in such a way that I find the most productive of our readings thus far.

When dividing articles across the lines of historical vs. comparative, my own rationale had to do with both the authors’ approach to their subject material and the scale at which they were working. For example, we get the sense that in the second half of Kennedy’s book, it is a completely historical approach where we are seeing the evolution of rhetorical strategies as evidenced by the discursive features of cultures. It was hard to follow along with Kennedy, it felt like he was plodding along through the history, allowing small micro-instances of texts accumulate into a macro-level rhetorical theory. But even then, the theory he was building didn’t feel like a theory proper, as much as the features of Greek discourse. Borrowman on the other did offer a re-configuration of Aristotle’s rhetorical theory, but instead of spending time expounding on this theory, focuses more on on the translations of Aristotle and how this contribute to our historical understanding of Aristotle. In what should be no surprise, historical approaches tend to focus on smaller events and contextualize them in larger contexts. I see how these studies matter, but they don’t necessarily float my boat. I’m much more intrigued by understanding and expanding theory, an approach that is somewhat more prominent when we look at the comparative articles.

Mao and Hesford seem to be overtly concerned with big picture ideas, but each have a different set of concerns and take different approaches to how they utilize their evidence. But what they have in common is a goal of comparative rhetoric that allows for cross-cultural communication. For Hesford, that means resisting the urge to retreat into our disciplinary identities and taking globalization head on, recognizing the pedagogical/ethical dilemmas it puts in front of us. Mao asks us to open up the Western tradition—so dependent on definitions—to consider usage in his “ecology of historicity, specificity, and in congruity” (450). Two very different goals here, but two different approaches in supporting those goals. If Mao were my student, I would applaud him for taking on such challenging sources as his evidence, but question the connection between Zhuangzi and facts of non/usage—or lack thereof. I think Dao does offer Western Rhetoric something—I’d even wager a lot—but Mao does little to explicate that offering. On the other hand, I would admonish Hesford for too heavily summarizing. Just as I was plodding along through Kennedy, I felt the same with Hesford; getting bogged down in sources without really seeing explicit synthesis, more of just a nodding to the vague term of “globalization.’ As such, I think these two are moving in the right direction, but they don’t quite take us there. But as I indicated in my opening, all is not lost. While these examples of an historical approach focus on the micro to buld to macro and comparative fails to connect macro to micro, Arabella Lyon succeeds in doing both, precisely because she works between the macro and the micro, the historical and comparative.

We indicated in class that Lyon seems to be taking a much more historiographic approach, one that takes ancient Chinese philosophical texts and first contextualizes them within history, exemplifying Mao’s ecology of specificity and historicity. Lyon claims that in understanding the terms shi and wuwei in history, we contribute to both historical understanding and contemporary rhetorical theory, getting at the goals of both historical and comparative approaches. Working within both historical and contemporary, the historiographic opens up theory in ways that one or the other cannot, as evidenced by Lyon’s approach. She gives us just enough Chinese history to make us dangerous, i.e., enough so that we can understand the contexts in which shi and wuwei appear, offering multiple possible definitions of each term. Of note here is that while giving history, Lyon never becomes plodding; instead, giving us the necessities of history, she moves right into close reading of texts. 

Perhaps I responded so well to this close reading because of the familiarity of the method, but I also believe it was because of what it accomplished. Lyon not only helps us understand the terms, moves from this close reading (micro) to explain how it affects her overarching project (macro). It is this negotiation between the two that makes Lyon’s argument so effective. I only wish she had gone further in showing how Western theory can be enhanced by the two concepts. But that thought leads me to question how I’m approaching Global Rhetorics. Is it appropriate to synthesize East and West, or does it compromise the integrity of each? Or is it more important that we acknowledge how we are situated as we try to negotiate between and pull together threads of rhetorical theory?