National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition

Rhetorical Boundaries and Agency

Rhetorical Boundaries an d Agency The study of rhetoric inspires inner debates about one’s preparation and abilities. What does one need to study or know to approach the Confucian tradition? What can one know of the Arabic tradition of rhetoric? What if one does not read Arabic? Do we need to know the language of the other in order to understand its rhetoric? In one sense the answer to this last question is an easy “yes, we do.” After all, how can we hope to know another’s rhetoric without fully understanding their language, without knowing the historical and semantic nuances that inform authorial choices in text production, as well as the choices audiences make in reception? But where is the time to learn the various languages I need to know: Egyptian Arabic, Classical Arabic, Modern Arabic, Taiwanese, (the dialects of) Chinese, etc., etc., etc.? Our students will be in class Monday morning, new ones next semester. Ever more and more faces, languages, and rhetorics. Yet, there is only so much time. Problematic or not, working with translation is, obviously, not a new phenomenon. And neither is the process of transposing the meaning and significance of a text from one cultural context or time period to another. As philosopher Ram Adhar Mall puts it: It is undisputed that the process of transposing is a troublesome thing, and never succeeds in producing total congruences, be it on the inter- or intracultural level. Nevertheless, this is generally the case irrespective of whether we translate the Greek logos as the Latin ratio, as the Christian God-Father, as the German Vernunft, as the English reason, or in expressions of other languages. To be sure, a similar translation is even more difficult and problematic in the intercultural field because of the greater differences of the language- and culture-spheres. Yet, the differences between the towns of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem were no less considerable in the beginning. (2004, 321) The challenge is to continue to build after and with the other’s words, with their art, as carefully, honestly, and ethically as possible. This process entails precision and a dedication to getting the meanings right, an Rhetorical Boundaries and Agency     85 absolute commitment to being true to our better selves and the best of the culture of the other, to the other’s absolute right to selfhood and his or her own meanings and, when we have a sense of them, the other ’s meaning-making processes. Of course, linguists know that we can never experience the language of the other as the other experiences it. The bilingual never masters a second language to the extent of a native speaker. The same is true for rhetoric. We study other rhetorics to achieve the level of expertise that the study affords us. We work against and accept, with humility, the limits of our knowledge. So, yes, we must begin by reminding ourselves that the problem of understanding is part of the human condition. We proceed from there with the tools we have available to us—or we go get the tools or help we need. As linguist and language educator Michael Byram reminds us in his book, Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education, even people who speak the same language do not always understand each other. Factors such as dialect interference and highly contextualized semantic content can complicate communication and understanding. These are the barriers , and we overcome them, work with them, or walk away to return another day. The point is that “a substitute for unconscious cultural, and linguistic, competence can be provided through conscious learning , accompanied by an imaginative willingness to abandon temporarily the semantics of [one’s] own language and culture” (1989, 91). This willingness to let go so as to understand the linguistically unfamiliar requires that we make an “imaginative leap” (87). As Byram explains it, this leap may take us to new knowledge even as it supplies meanings that are closer to the experience of the interpreter than to the other. But the dialectic of understanding and misinterpretation is the hermeneutic problem with which we are all faced everyday. To greater or lesser extents, we are always making imaginative leaps in our communications. Understanding another—not to mention one’s self—is the central problem of our lives. I believe that a similar “imaginative willingness” to learn about another’s composing processes, when accompanied by a willingness to open one’s self to meaning making processes from elsewhere, can...