The study of world rhetorics appears to be in a nascent state; scholars are just beginning to develop frameworks in which we can have meaningful conversations about pieces of literature across cultures. Levitt and Khagram have done a good job in establishing a concrete framework for transnational studies, unifying a multitude of disjointed scholarly research, and challenging the status quo of Academia by recommending new modes of conducting research (philosophical and public transnationalism). However, the vast majority of scholarly research seems to fall into the empirical category of transnationalism, and even there the field is still evolving.

Mao and Connor both give a survey of the history of comparative rhetoric, the field that studies the way rhetorics function across cultures. Mao begins by critiquing the work of Robert T. Oliver, who conducted a study on Asian rhetorics. Oliver’s goals were to “identify and conceptualize the rhetorical theories and practices of ancient India and China on their own terms,” (403) and he did manage to argue that while their rhetoric does not follow Western traditions it is still inherent in the text, but his work often succumbed to unwarranted generalizations and failed to give a complete analysis of Chinese rhetoric (405-6). In 1998, Xing Lu published a more accurate analysis of Chinese rhetoric that utilized their own terms and successfully pointed out the nuances and complexity of their works (415). The qualitative difference between these pieces shows how the field has evolved, but it also shows that comparative rhetoric is still focusing primarily on empirical transnationalism; there are still issues in even identifying components of other rhetorics.

Connor’s article reveals a similar pattern. She begins by assessing the early work of Robert Kaplan, a founder of comparative rhetoric, and finds that his work was hindered by tendencies towards a deficiency model (495). Connor goes on to describe research that was conducted on rhetoric of various cultures, and again the research stops at identifying features of the rhetoric. And even in those examples, traces of the deficiency model can be seen. For example, Connor describes Finnish rhetoric as having a “delay” before introducing the main topic of a piece (506). This word should not be used if we are to engage with the rhetoric “on its own terms.” There is no delay; the main topic is exactly where it should be for Finnish rhetoric. The only way to arrive at the term “delay” is to look at the rhetoric through a Western lens, which is exactly what comparative rhetoric scholars have been trying to avoid.

So, it seems to me that the first problem that needs to be addressed before any meaningful studies in world rhetoric can be conducted is how to even identify rhetorical components on their own terms. From what I have seen, there is a re-occurring mistake that scholars in the field are making: they are trying to study rhetoric using a theoretical framework that does not yet exist. Chinese rhetoric is not Greek rhetoric, and the two forms do not use the same terms, literally or figuratively. If we think about any other form of rhetoric in terms of our own rhetoric, we will inevitably fall short of properly describing it. Ideally, we would like to analyze all rhetoric using a unified theory of global rhetoric, but such a theory does not yet exist; it is our job to make that theory, and we must first begin by analyzing the components of other rhetorics.

I believe that we must analyze rhetorics on their own before we can compare them, but a major difficulty in the field seems to be just that: we only know how to measure other rhetorics against our own. So, I propose thinking of rhetorics in a similar manner to genre analysis. One does not analyze a research grant proposal in terms of a short story, nor does one complain that a sonnet lacks a thesis. The same should hold true for rhetorics. Just as we are able to identify the textual features of various genres (independently of all other genres), we should be able to identify distinct rhetorical features, much like the way Xing Lu identified the various forms of Chinese speech, independent of all other lenses. Only then can the comparisons begin.