Contrastive Rhetoric

Immediately upon reading the opening quote from Edward Sapir, I went into the linguist-trained mode: be wary of Sapir and Whorf, and don’t take the strong versions of their “hypothesis” (which wasn’t even a hypothesis and which has strong and weak versions).

As Casanave makes clear, we cannot and should not take it as an easy truth but we cannot simply reject the concept either. She suggests that the reality of cultural influence is much more complex and less extreme than most researchers want to consider (and then introduces Kaplan’s whole concept of Contrastive Rhetoric in a pretty critical way; see page 31). She reasonably asks, “what is a ‘cultural’ pattern of rhetorical organization?” (30). This is intangible—and can therefore be created and debated by scholars—and yet we’re trying to apply this intangibility to something “concrete” (at least, we think it’s concrete)—a piece of L2 writing—so that we can better measure this “concrete” thing against some “tangible” standard.

Kowal said that “Kaplan’s views of English and Oriental (and so on) rhetoric come from Kaplan’s own prescriptive expectations as a U.S. scholar within a very particular kind of educational system rather than from an understand of world Englishes” (Casanave 38). This seems obvious and evident to me; Hinds pointed out (also in Casanave) that Kaplan’s representation of English is ethnocentric. It seems that Kaplan would have to have been very aware and very careful to not make it so—and even had he been aware, some ethnocentricity could still be identified, as he’s writing from his own perspective in English. That’s what happens in contrasts. His base is English, because that’s what he knows—we shouldn’t be surprised that some ethnocentricity exists. But then, I think that’s one of the basic problems with CR: a comparison must have a base (standards and norms), and researchers are basing themselves in English—however, in assuming (even without bad intention) that what they know is the default, they “tend to create cultural differences that promote the superiority of Western writing” (Kubota, via Connor 233).

Can we say at some point that the rhetoric depends on the writer more than the culture? Or can we at least recognize that the writer has some power within and around the culture? And what about the reader? The gender of the writer, the education level, the generation? (Connor begins to mention, in her conclusion, the need for sensitivity toward some of these aspects.) As in English, no rhetorical structure in any language is absolute law. Let’s compare great writers of academia, poetry, and fiction within cultures. Certainly they won’t all follow the same structure, even within a language. There may be conventions per language or per culture or per country, but there’s no way of saying that all U.S. native-speaking English writers follow these specific characteristics.

And then there’s the generational problem: we’ve seen differences of writing produced under current-traditional and process approaches; should we group this all together as twentieth-century English rhetoric? This change is not a confined phenomenon; Casanave points out that “The famous eight-legged Chinese essay…is no longer an influential genre” (37). Conventions, styles, and movements change. They’re not confined by cultures.

I see the potential of CR. Some knowledge on culturally various rhetorics could help me as a teacher understand student approaches and figure out new strategies for L2 writing, but not in absolute terms. That languages make or have certain conventions, I accept. But I accept that those are not fixed.