《文体学2》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《文体学2（25页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、 13Chapter 2 Contrastive rhetoric and studies of Chinese and English writing 2.1. Introduction It has been argued that the study of text styles such as linearity and circularity in contrastive rhetoric may not be sufficient for understanding overall differences between English and Chinese writing (s
2、ee e.g. Scollon, 1997b). With the aim of locating the present study in previous research on contrastive rhetoric and highlighting the gaps that the study attempts to fulfil, this chapter focuses on the following three aspects. First, it reviews contrastive rhetoric as a field of study including its
3、history and contemporary developments. It discusses previous contrastive rhetoric studies in four different areas, namely, contrastive text linguistic studies, studies of writing as cultural and educational activities, classroom-based contrastive studies, and contrastive rhetorical genre studies. Th
4、en, the literature review outlines previous contrastive studies on Chinese and English writing. Finally, previous contrastive studies on media discourse are described with reference to the present study. 2.2. Contrastive rhetoric as a field of study In 1966, Kaplan published his famous article Cultu
5、ral Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education, which marked the birth of the notion now known as contrastive rhetoric. In this article, he reinforced the Whorfian Hypothesis in its weak form which asserts that ones native language influences ones thoughts. He, further, assumed that different langu
6、ages had their own specific and culturally bound conventions and patterns of writing. His basic interest was in the interference of culturally bound first language thought and writing patterns on writing in a second language. In Connors view (1996, p.5), Language and writing are cultural phenomena.
7、As a direct consequence, each language has rhetorical conventions unique to it. Furthermore the 14linguistic and rhetorical conventions of the first language interfere with writing in the second language. The hypotheses underlying this view of contrastive rhetoric may be summarised as 1) Each langua
8、ge and culture has rhetorical conventions that are unique to itself; 2) The rhetorical conventions of students L1 interfere with their ESL writing (Grabe Kaplan Kaplan, 1966, 1972, 1987, 1988, 1991, 2000). After about four decades of research and debate, the major concern of contrastive rhetoric is
9、now moving from purely structural descriptions to an interest in “cognitive and sociocultural variables of writing in addition to the linguistic variables” (Connor, 1996, p.18). Recent research has expanded the concept of contrastive rhetoric and moved it away from looking only at the effects of tra
10、nsfer from L1 to L2 writing towards an interdisciplinary area of cross-language and cross-culture study that benefits from the theories and methods of such related fields as applied linguistics, composition and rhetoric studies, anthropology, translation studies and discourse analysis (Connor, 1996,
11、 1997, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005). As summarised by Connor (1997), some internal and external forces gave rise to this change in perspective. The internal force comes from criticism of contrastive rhetoric, which has required it to go beyond traditional linguistic parameters of analysis to consider dis
12、cursive features, processes and contexts of writing. The external forces come from new developments in discourse analysis and changing focuses in first language composition research. What follows is a brief summary of the internal and external forces referred to above. Then, new developments and dir
13、ections of research in contrastive rhetoric are outlined. Special attention is given to studies of Chinese writing and Chinas intellectual context. The strongest internal criticism of contrastive rhetoric has argued that contrastive 15rhetoric tends to regard cultural rhetoric as a static, exotic an
14、d normative system separated from the dynamics of history, and tends to treat English rhetoric as a kind of rhetorical canon (Kubota, 1992, 1997, 1998, 1999; Kubota Ostler, 2001). In Kubotas words (1992, p.20), contrastive rhetoric tends to “construct a homogenous representation of the Other while l
15、egitimating a certain kind of rhetoric as a canon”. Other scholars have also criticised contrastive rhetoric for its reductionist, deterministic, prescriptive, and essentialist orientation (e.g. Leki, 1997; Spack, 1997; Zamel, 1997). Kubota and Lehner (2004) argue that Despite its unique cross-cultu
16、ral focus on writing and its well-meaning effort to facilitate second language learning, contrastive rhetoric has tended to construct static homogenous, and apolitical images of the rhetorical patterns of various written languages (p. 9). From the perspectives of critical literacy and modern linguistic theory, language is neither historically fixed nor emergent out of nowhere; it needs to be understood as fluid, dynamic and constituted through cultural, political and soc
