Week 6: Contrastive Rhetoric

I hadn't heard the terms "contrastive/intercultural rhetoric" until Carol brought them up in our class last week. The writing center pedagogy class I took at Rhode Island College had a week on differences among English Language Learners with a heavy focus on how essay organization, particularly thesis placement, and understanding of citational practices, tends to vary, but we framed relevant examples as things we MIGHT see, not deterministic formulas of, for example, Chinese international students will all plagiarize because they are used to communism. This has never come up with any students of mine.

Predicating this area of rhetoric studies on the culture concept means its boundaries will never be clear because even cultural anthropologists can't agree what exactly culture is and if it's a useful idea. I appreciate Kaplan's impulse to clearly define areas of the field, but I agree with his critics and have heard them applied to historical conceptions of anthropology many times.

Subbing the word "intercultural" for "contrastive" is problematic, but I do support expanding the scope of the field beyond ELL pedagogy. To me, "contrastive" doesn't imply that languages are contrasted with English specifically or that the contrast is negative. The "inter" of "intercultural" has been criticized and exchanged for "trans" in transnational feminist circles because the "inter" implies a perspective, usually from the US or another part of the West, so "intercultural" may to go far enough. Does UIowa's Rhetoric Department teach classes or units on either of these rhetorics?

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