Dialogue; Response to Ulla Connor’s comments  

Oleh:

Kubota, Ryuko ; Lehner, Al

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Second Language Writing (Full Text) vol. 14 no. 2 (Jun. 2005), page 137-143.
Fulltext: Kubota_Ryuko, p. 137-143.pdf (86.18KB)

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In her comments on our article, ‘‘Toward critical contrastive rhetoric,’’ Ulla Connor criticizes our work as misrepresenting the current scholarship in contrastive rhetoric, claiming that it is in no way static, essentialist, or assimilationist. We do concur with Connor on the diverse and evolving nature of contrastive rhetoric research. This is precisely why we included in our article a review of literature which provides diverse insights into cultural difference in written discourse structures and yet is often overlooked in mainstream contrastive rhetoric research. As Connor points out, it is exciting to see pedagogical insights based on contrastive rhetoric research, such as Casanave (2004) and Ferris and Hedgcock (2005), which we could have mentioned more in depth in our article if they had been published earlier. Despite her plea for us to pay attention to a non-essentialist orientation of current research, the criticism that Connor directs against our work, including our previous publications, supports the conventional assumption that mainstream contrastive rhetoric tends to hold; that is, there exist distinct patterns of written texts in different languages as an objective fact, almost devoid of any sociopolitical practices that shape our understanding of cultural rhetoric. More specifically, when Connor criticizes Kubota (1998a) and Hirose (2003) for methodological flaws, she supports the existence of cultural uniqueness because the results of these studies question essentialized images of Japanese rhetorical patterns. Furthermore, referring to Japanese scholars’ tendency to self-essentialize their own culture as discussed in Kubota (2002), Connor interprets this to imply that Japanese rhetoric indeed has unique characteristics, taking it as an objective fact rather than as a discursive practice. Although we did not and do not argue that there are no cultural differences, we are proposing to move beyond merely discovering, describing, and thus perpetuating cultural differences as given. Instead, we are suggesting that we critically explore how cultural labels and images are produced and reproduced in contested discourses and how critical consciousness about taken-for-granted cultural knowledge can be fostered among teachers and students. In the following, we would like to respond to several points of Connor’s criticism: methodological issues of previous studies, issues surrounding nihonjinron or cultural self-essentialism, the concept of assimilation, and issues of critical pedagogies.

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