Well, my disintegration into informality continues. I wore SWEATS to our graduate class last week. SWEATS! I have never done that--NEVER, and I have been teaching since 1988. In graduate school, a friend of mine once commented: "I've never seen you wear blue jeans to class..." He was right. I think I wore black jeans once...
What's the purpose of this blog entry? I don't know. I'm tired, I'm full of M & Ms, and I just finished reading the class blog entries. I'm excited about everyone's projects in 751, and I'm glad Jon Benda FINALLY stopped by and commented on my blog. Jon was in 751 in 2000, right, Jon?
I'm curious to see what everyone will say about Lu tomorrow. Any thoughts out there? How does Lu's text fit into what we discussed last week about ancient rhetorics and the challenge of comparativism? I'll see if I can gather together some coherent thoughts by tomorrow morning to post. Jon, if you are out there, post your review of Lu's book. I think you have one out there that I read.
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This is a little dated (2002!) and a little long, but this is from my minor exam (by the way, Xiaoye You at Penn State has some really interesting new stuff on Chinese rhetorics):
Despite Lu's interesting and helpful notion of "ambiguous similarity" and her criticism of Western studies of Chinese rhetoric as evidencing Orientalism, Lu's work contains some flaws that, if not directly attributable to Orientalism, compromise her work. While criticizing Western studies of Chinese rhetoric, Lu seems to ignore any contemporary Chinese studies of Chinese rhetoric. In fact, she insists that "to this day, rhetoric is not identified as a separate discipline in China's institutions of higher learning" (301). This is only partly true--in saying this, Lu ignores the study of Xiucixue (修辭學) that has regained popularity recently in China and Taiwan. Yameng Liu makes the argument that the study and teaching of written rhetoric is made evident by a large number of treatises and texts that date as far back as the Jin dynasty; he cites a relatively recently collection of rhetorical treatises dating from the Warring States period to the Qing dynasty--the Source Book of Classical Chinese Rhetoric (Gu Hanyu Xiucixue Huibian 古漢語修辭學資料彙編)--and a history of Chinese rhetoric--A Draft History of Chinese Rhetoric (Zhongguo Xiucixue Shi Gao 中國修辭學史稿) ("To Capture" 325). Another problem is that Lu ignores the social and material contexts of the production of most of the texts she uses. "Ancient texts are treated as homogeneous and neutral sources for the times on which they report, as if the time of recording itself were totally irrelevant to the content and message of the texts" (Defoort 710). Lu seems to take texts like the Shang shu as authoritative texts that were not compromised by their transmission. In the case of the Shang shu, however, Mark Edward Lewis argues, citing Matsumoto Masaaki, that different portions were compiled at different times and for different audiences: "by the late fourth century [BCE] there existed at least two and probably three distinct Shang shu, a ru [Confucianist] version exemplified by the citations in the Mencius, a Mohist version, and a historian's version indicated by the citations in the Zuo zhuan and the Guo yu" (106-7). In ignoring this kind of scholarship, Lu ignores the rhetorical nature of the rhetorical texts she analyzes.
Part of Lu's disinterest in the materiality of the Warring States texts might stem from her disciplinary emphasis on oral language and oral rhetoric. As she argues near the beginning of her book, rhetorical analyses of Chinese literary and historical works "are limited in … their interest in written language at the expense of oral speech. Consequently, such studies offer useful information on Chinese language and stylistic writing but fail to identify theories of rhetoric and communication and to offer specific explanations of the cultural and philosophical orientation[s] that affect rhetorical practice" (27). She equates rhetoric and communication with oral speech and written language with literary studies. The materiality and transmission of written texts might have seemed to her outside the scope of the oral-based rhetoric that she was investigating.
The effects of a focus on the "foundational" texts of Chinese culture is another troubling and possibly Orientalist aspect of studies of Chinese rhetoric, including Lu's. This focus is not in and of itself troubling--certainly I wouldn't suggest that the study of the rhetoric of Lun Yu or Zhuangzi should be off limits any more than I would want to argue for an end to the study of classical Greek rhetorical treatises. What I am more concerned about is the uses of those studies vis-à-vis the notion of a quintessentially "Chinese" rhetoric. As I've argued about Kennedy's chapter, studies of Chinese rhetoric that focus on classical texts run the risk of Orientalizing their subject if they suggest too close or easy a connection between the purported theories of rhetoric or language found in the texts and contemporary practices and theories of Chinese rhetoric. Even Xing Lu falls partly into this trap in the conclusion to her book, where she characterizes Chinese political communication as highly influenced by Confucianism and by Legalism, "China's first state ideology" (305). Mao's "little red book" in Lu's description ends up becoming a modern-day instance of Confucian moral persuasion. Such descriptions, if not sufficiently complicated by analysis of historical circumstances that led to the rise of Communism in China, tend to posit a direct line of influence of the past on the present that makes the former the archetype of the latter.
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