Doing Comparative Rhetoric Responsibly

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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).

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Notes on contributors

LuMing 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.