ABSTRACT

What is comparative rhetoric in the twenty-first century? How should comparative rhetoric scholars go about defining and advancing it? How should they study non-Euro-American rhetorical practices like Chinese rhetorics comparatively? This chapter aims to address these and other related questions and to develop a new terministic screen for comparative rhetorical studies in the present. First, this chapter rehearses contrastive rhetoric, intercultural rhetoric, and cultural rhetoric(s) to highlight and further complicate the cultural turn each has enacted. Second, it defines comparative rhetoric as both a practice and a methodology by moving away from facts of essence and by embracing facts of usage and facts of nonusage and eventfulness and interdependence. Third, it revists Robert Oliver’s 1971 groundbreaking work to help identify, and draw lessons from, the key insights and glaring gaps evidenced in this work and still relevant or resonant in our own time. Finally, this chapter concludes by offering some brief remarks for the future of comparative rhetorical studies.