Torrington: Complicating Contrastive Rhetoric

Connor's and Kubota's texts push me to consider the ways that communication gets taken up across cultural, social, and historical context, as well as the ways these shifting communicative systems get studied and theorized across the disciplines. Even as Connor works to articulate a more fluid framework for contrastive rhetoric, she operates under particular notions of genre and writing that, if codified, could limit the domain of contrastive rhetorical studies in counterproductive ways. For example, she writes: "although contrastive rhetoric has often defined national cultures in the received mode, researchers in contrastive rhetoric have certainly not interpreted all differences in L2 writing as stemming from the L1 or interference from the national culture. Instead, these researchers have explained such differences in written communication as often stemming from multiple sources, including L1, national culture, L1 educational background, disciplinary culture, genre characteristics, and mismatched expectations between readers and writers" ("New Directions" 504). Given that new research paths in the fields of literacy and writing studies show how the trajectories of literate activity across a range of situations, I argue that merely pluralizing the sources of difference across cultures fails to account for the contingent, shifting relationships among a writer's or speaker's communicative resources. In other words, though it may be possible (and in some cases, even useful) to map out and contrast patterns of speech or writing across contexts, such an investigation must necessarily account for the dynamic and often tacit influences acting on a language learner or writer at any given moment in his or her development.

Contrastive rhetoric studies, then, must operate within frameworks that allow it, as Kubota notes, "to escape a binary logic of same versus different, diverse versus homogeneous, and unsystematic versus systematic" (15). Such frameworks will help scholars negotiate with language learners "critique[s] of cultural representations from the concepts of discourse and power/knowledge" (15). Another potential framework for navigating power structures in language comes from writing studies. In “Awareness Versus Production: Probing Students’ Antecedent Genre Knowledge,” Natasha Artemeva and Janna Fox ask “When instructors walk into an introductory . . . classroom on the first day of class, what should they assume about their students’ prior knowledge of disciplinary genres? How could they find out which past experiences may allow students to engage appropriately with communication tasks in a new discipline and which may hinder such engagement?” Writing instructors are interested in applying these kinds of questions to our understanding of our students’ experiences with writing and their knowledge of how writing works in specific settings, and I believe that studies of contrastive rhetoric could adopt a similar conceptual framework of antecedent knowledge--particularly as such a concept not only helps students and instructors gauge prior language knowledge, but also it compels students to be aware of the full complexities of their antecedent literate practices, which in turn helps them repurpose those practices in new contexts.