Facing the Audience: Reconsidering “Audience” through the Chinese Concept of “Pace”

This chapter considers how the concept of “face” can inform discussions of audience in the fields of rhetoric and composition studies. Face is a primary concern in verbal interaction, but an understanding of face productively expands and complicates issues of audience in written communication as well. As I will argue, the concept of face provides a locally situated and dynamic understanding of audience, but one that sees each particular interaction, each text, as explicitly and intricately connected to the way the world works.