US and Russian traditions in rhetoric, education and culture

Abstract

Traditional rhetoric attempts to find the available means of persuasion in public assemblies, law courts and ceremonials and is grounded in cultural values and beliefs. Traditional rhetoric supports the development of social communities and posits education as a primary means of maintaining these communities. In contrast, contemporary alternatives to traditional rhetoric recognize multiple cultural values both within and between social communities and seek larger unities that encompass but do not eradicate individual and communal differences. US rhetorician Kenneth Burke seeks syntheses among multiple and potentially competing persuasive acts, promotes educational practices of mutual respect and reciprocal learning and advocates a rhetorical theory and practice with potentially global reach. Russian literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin envisions novelistic practices of polyphony, heteroglossia and carnival as modes of dialogue that embrace individual differences within larger, more complex unities. These complementary rhetorical and dialogical practices support US multiculturalism and Russian transculturalism, respectively, but they also and more significantly promote dialogue across cultural boundaries as the basis of an intercultural rhetoric and an intercultural approach to curricula across a range of disciplines.

Keywords:

• rhetoric
• dialogue
• multiculturalism
• transculturalism
• intercultural education

Notes

1. In earlier Greek rhetoric, Plato (Gorgias 504d6–504e5, 505e1–508c5, Kennedy 1999: 60–61, 64–65) perceived current rhetorical practice to be mere persuasion based on opinion rather than knowledge and advocated a true rhetoric based in knowledge of the virtues—justice, temperance, piety and bravery. Isocrates (Antidosis 274-278, Kennedy 1999: 40–41) similarly sought to ground rhetoric in the virtues but emphasized the character of the speaker rather than the nature of the rhetorical art itself.

2. In later Roman rhetoric, Cicero (I. viii. 33–34) observes the power of eloquence to establish and maintain human communities, ‘either to gather scattered humanity into one place, or to lead it out of its brutish existence in the wilderness up to our present condition of civilization …, or, after the establishment of social communities, to give shape to laws, tribunals, and civic rights’.

3. Graff and Winn (2006: 48) acknowledge that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s (1969) characterization of Aristotle’s epideictic is probably an exaggeration: ‘it is clearly unfair to suggest that Aristotle believed epideictic was only a matter of judging the speaker’s skill’.

4. Clowes 2011: 99–119) provides an overview and interpretation of Ryklin’s Russian texts.