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In early June 2013, a group of rhetoric and composition scholars gathered in Lawrence, Kansas, to take part in a comparative rhetoric seminar, part of the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer In...

While popular and scholarly literature on Zen Buddhism abounds, few works directly address Zen rhetoric (Mark McPhail, Zen in the Art of Rhetoric, Albany: SUNY P, 1996; Dale Wright, “Rethinking Tra...

Using the Confucius Institutes as a representative anecdote to think through a series of incongruities, this essay seeks to map out the future of comparative rhetoric. It reconfigures the terms of engagement through a critique of the etic/emic approach and redefines comparative rhetoric by pivoting toward “facts of usage” and facts of “non”-usage. To close the gap between what we think we know about and can speak for the other and what has to happen in order for us to begin to know about and speak for the other, it further calls for enacting the art of recontextualization as a discursive third, a metadisciplinary stance that helps us become more self-reflexive about our own biases, binaries, and boundaries and more attentive to the increasingly blurred and shifting boundaries between self and other, past and present, and local and global.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 So, this phrase has gotten a lot of attention. First during and immediately after the Octalog panel in the Tweetstream, then in f2f and continuing social-media interactions after. Most younger scholars express excitement to hear someone say what they've been thinking all along; many "established" scholars express dismay at my lack of respect. Disciplinarity does do its job, does it not? 2 I will, however, offer my definition of rhetoric. Just for the record, when I use the word rhetoric, I am evoking a shorthand that encompasses thousands of years of intellectual production all over the globe—a set of productions that we have only just begun to understand—and that generally refers to systems of discourse through which meaning was, is, and continues to be made in a given culture. 3 In Signs Taken for Wonders, Homi Bhabha reminds us that "[t]here is a scene in the cultural writings of English colonialism which repeats so insistently" that it "inaugurates a literature of empire." That scene, he tells us, is always "played out in the wild and wordless wastes" of "the colonies" and consists entirely of the "fortuitous discovery of the English book" by colonized peoples; this scene marks the book as an "emblem," one of the colonizers' "signs taken for wonders" (29). 4 See especially Lisa Brooks; Joy Harjo; Thomas King; Nancy Shoemaker (ed.); Linda Tuhiwai Smith; Robert Warrior; and Shawn Wilson. 5 For an examination of "paracolonial," see Vizenor. 6 A totally unsatisfying and provocative opening into my current work that argues for situating specific rhetorical events in the continuum of rhetorical practices (alphabetic and non-alphabetic) that hold particular cultures together over time. 7 I take inspiration from Richard Graff and Michael Leff; Thomas Habinek; Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille Schultz; and Susan Miller. 8 See http://wealthforcommongood.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ShiftingResponsibility.pdf for more information. 9 For Jim and Bob … Susan, Sharon, Richard, Jan, Nan, and Jerry (chair), Octalog, 1988, St. Louis. 10 Éthea, where animals belong, in their wildness. I'm using Charles Scott's The Question of Ethics for reading, as CS cites such in the Iliad (6.506–11). The horse wants to return to its Nomós, field, as opposed to Nómos, law (Scott 143). I've consulted Charles Chamberlain's "From Haunts to Character." 11 I would claim, therefore, that it is our responsibility to search out our other-abilities, our impotentialities, to address the other that is indefinite. I'm not referring to potentialities, that is, Techné or Dynamis. Rather, I am referring to what Aristotle notes only in passing as Adynamis, or Impotentiality (see Metaphysics 1046e, 25–32). This, then, would be the para-methodology of misology! As well as the wildness that I refer to! In reference, as Giorgio Agamben says, Adynamis, or Impotentiality, would address all that has NOT YET been intuited, thought, acted on in ethico-political lived experiences (see Potentialities). Or forgotten! At least, in our wide, impotentially wild field.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I thank Xing (Lucy) Lu, Arabella Lyon, and Bo Wang for reading early drafts of this essay, and for their highly constructive comments. Notes 1For starters, see Hum and Lyon, as well as Combs, Lipson, Lyon ("Rhetorical"), Mao ("Studying"), Wang, Wu, and You. 2I assume we are not disputing the singular contributions his work has made to comparative rhetoric. 3Hum and Lyon also point out the danger of conducting comparative rhetoric through the lens of one's own tradition without reflection, and they further discuss the importance of crossing borders and acknowledging one's (partial) standpoint (155–156; 159–160). 4In fact, Hum and Lyon have explicitly discussed four different approaches—including feminist approaches to Chinese rhetoric—that scholars have developed in the past in carrying out their comparative rhetorical work. They have also called for a need to develop revisionist readings and to recover lost perspectives (157–161). 5Lu also recognizes and indeed discusses the interdependence of description and appropriation or what she refers to as historical and scriptural hermeneutics (Rhetoric 21). 6Lipson also reminds us of the difficulty of casting aside "both the theoretical lens and related values and apparatus through which Western scholars have come to view human communication" (3). In the same essay, drawing on Steven Mailloux's work Lipson also proposes using the term "cultural rhetoric" to underscore the importance of culture and to focus on the rhetorics of different cultures (22–24). Additional informationNotes on contributorsLuMing Mao LuMing Mao is a Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Asian/Asian American Studies Program at Miami University, 356F Bachelor Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.

The guest editor introduces this special issue on Chinese rhetoric by emphasizing that we should (1) focus on how the Chinese engaged their domestic and foreign Other; (2) be prepared to acknowledge and validate voices that call for or search for other paradigms; and (3) resist the temptation to codify any definitions of rhetoric even as we seek non-Western alternatives.

The author identifies limitations in various approaches that Westerners have taken to non-Western rhetorical traditions. Focusing on excerpts from the Analects of Confucius, he demonstrates his own proposed approach to ancient Chinese rhetoric, emphasizing that Westerners studying it should seek to identify its discursive fields while also reflecting on their own conditions.

In this article I argue that the making of Chinese American rhetoric takes place in border zones and that it encodes both Chinese and European American rhetorical traditions. By focusing on the discursive category of “face” and “indirection”/ “directness,” I demonstrate that Chinese American rhetoric becomes viable and transformative not by securing a logical, unified, or unique order, but by participating in a process of becoming where meanings are in flux and where significations are contingent upon each and every particular experience.

Persuasive discourse, either as a separate mode of discourse (Kinneavy 1971) or as a distinctive part of argumentative discourse,2 frequendy remains part of the overall writing assignment for our composition students. Although we may disagree as to how to define exactly or teach persuasive discourse in writing classrooms, we have more or less followed the tradition of Western classical rhetoric with respect to our basic understanding of it--although few of us would now restrict ourselves only to discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion (Aristotle 1960: 7). For example, we teach our students different sub-types of persuasive discourse and ask them to apply ethical, emotional (pathetic) and logical proofs to their own persuasive essays; we select political speeches, polemic essays or modern advertising materials as prime examples of how different persuasive strategies and techniques can be most effectively invoked to achieve their respective objectives of winning. To varying degrees, many composition text books have adopted, and thus perpetuated this normal way of doing things with persuasive discourse.3 In so doing, however, we have--perhaps unknowingly--imparted to our students two problematic notions, which underlie much of what has been believed to be persuasive discourse. The first assumes that persuasive discourse is grounded in or predicated on conflict or confrontation, which it aims to overcome or eradicate. The second perceives audience as both external4 and oppositional, whom persuasive discourse is intended to transform or convert. It is these two notions and their probable consequences that I will discuss first in this essay. Following this discussion, I will draw upon, respectively, Grice's cooperative model of conversation (1975; 1989) and Burke's concept of (1962) to propose a new heuristic model5 of persuasive discourse, one that takes cooperation through identification as a core constituent and provides a dynamic setting that is conducive to rhetorical diversities. Finally, I will consider some potentials of this new model in our writing classrooms.