Xiaoye You

I am interested in history of rhetoric and composition theories and practice. My research has grown in two closely related strands, i.e., comparative rhetoric and multilingual writing. With comparative rhetoric, I am trying to understand the historical evolution of Confucian rhetoric over the last two thousand years in light of some Western theoretical perspectives. Ultimately I want to show the cultural limits of the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition and the necessity of expending “the rhetorical tradition” in the backdrop of globalization. Scholars have just started utilizing non-Western rhetorical constructs to study human communication. With multilingual writing, I have looked into the history of English composition in China. I hope that my study will draw compositionists’ attention to issues unique to teaching English writing in postcolonial countries and provide scholars a historical foundation for further investigations in those contexts. When students learn to write in English as an additional language, they have to negotiate between their mother tongue-based cultures and rhetorical tradition with those coming along with English. Together studies in comparative rhetoric and multilingual writing serve those who have the courage to write in a language other than their mother tongues.