Phillips: English 540 Week Six Response

For this post I have opted to do what I did in week two: post some key points for consideration that I engaged with during my reading. Because I focused heavily on Connor’s Contrastive Rhetoric book last week, I decided to focus on the articles from this week. I appreciated some of the research methods suggested by Li’s article and Connor’s 2004 essay. Kubota’s questions struck me as particularly useful.

Li’s Key Points for Lisa:

Contextual quote: “It was no accident that classical rhetoric, the study of effective argument, was born in an ancient democracy, not in a dynasty. The world is not as free-flowing as postmodernists would like us to believe” (16).

Li proposes a yin/yang principle as an approach to contrastive rhetoric. That is, we can come to understand that cultures “are intertwined, [and curve] into each other’s sphere”(16). This makes a great deal of sense to me. Cultures circumambulate one another in a complicated dance. Languages, groups, and individuals do likewise.

Li asks us to consider two issues pertinent to an ESL writing context: (1) How to determine when cultural influences appear in student writing, and (2) what “culture-specific templates” consciously or unconsciously form a student’s antecedent genre knowledge (17). The guiding idea here is that Li wants us to avoid “omniscient” cultural explanations that essentialize students.

As a rhetorician, I appreciated Li’s discussion of George Kennedy’s “comparative rhetoric” vis-à-vis contrastive rhetoric. In other contexts, I have misunderstood that they were two distinct “fields.” I didn’t realize in what way they where different until I read Li’s explanation. I had a “well, duh,” moment or two. Moreover, Kennedy has a number of critics within classic rhetorical circles who prefer the term “Alternative Rhetorics” to include other culturally and historically situated ancient rhetorical traditions not all of which were “born in an ancient democracy”(Lipson and Binkley 3; Li 16).  Clearly, linguists are not unique in their disciplinary disputes about whose cultural model is whose and whose gets top “billing” in studies of culturally influenced writing patterns.

Li suggests that contrastive rhetoric is social not “political”(19). I cannot agree with Li on this, contrastive rhetoric is always already political as is pedagogy. I do not understand how Li can imply that CR is not “political.” What am I missing here??

Kubota’s Key Points for Lisa:

Contextual quote: Traditional contrastive rhetoric “reinforce[s] a cultural deficit view in which certain groups are seen as innately deficient because of their cultural and linguistic background[s]” (15).

Kubota makes a move toward “critical contrastive rhetoric” the aim of which is “political” to create “oppositional language against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of injustice” (16). {Perhaps Kubota’s point here answers my “What am I missing here?” question about Li’s article, but I still don’t fully understand how CR could be apolitical.} Is Kubota’s point to show that CCR is explicitly political in opposition to CR? Probably.

I found Kubota’s explication of Whorf particularly useful as she situates his work philosophically parallel to Baktinian notions about reflexivity and plurality and juxtaposes these two with Kaplan’s hierarchical cultural “Doodles.”

Finally, Kubota’s queries (page 17) offer us some useful research questions to ponder as we begin to consider our own projects. She asks:

• How have we come to believe that a certain cultural difference is true?
•   What political purposes have motivated the construction of particular beliefs about cultural difference?
• What alternative understandings of cultural difference, or counter-discourses, are available to transform our taken-for-granted knowledge? (17)

She answers that a critical contrastive rhetoric pedagogy “is self-reflexive” at the core (23).

Connor (2004) Key Points for Lisa:

Connor offers some useful research methodologies that may inform some of our work. Connor’s literature review featured Flowerdew’s four types of methodological categories: (1) genre analysis, (2) corpus-based studies, (3) contrastive rhetoric specific to academic discourse, and (4) ethnographic/naturalistic approaches (263). Connor’s explanation of these was concise and useful. Also useful was Connor’s definition of the “three schools of text analysis,” which are: (1) The Prague School’s “theme” and “rheme” analysis, (2) Systemic Linguistics developed by Halliday, and (3) A “New School” of discourse analysis that is interdisciplinary and applied (295).

My favorite word is “miniethnographics” posed by Louhiala-Salminen (Connor quoting L-S 301). This research method, according to Connor, “generate[s] descriptions of ‘slices of life’…of discourse in different cultures. After the descriptions were generated, comparisons of discourses and of how to get things done using discourses could be conducted” (301). I love this idea because I connect it to Foucault’s notion of “heterochronies” or “slices of time” in his Of Other Spaces. I have been seeking a way to think about how to conduct research on the senses and “miniethnographics” make a lot of sense to me. Thank you, Connor!

Outside sources referenced:

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Vol. 16:1 (Spring 1986):22-27. Print.

Lipson, Carol S. and Roberta A. Binkley, eds. Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004. Print.