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or white” perceptions of reality and “truth” and the concomitant
need for a dialectical relationship between that which is
Certain and that which is Uncertain – remains, unfortunately,
still pertinent and still pressing. In his introduction to a
collection of essays attending to Chinese rhetoric in the March
2010 issue of College English, LuMing Mao declared that the
Eastern tradition had to be studied by way of “the dialectical
process of moving between the external and the internal, between
the familiar and the unfamiliar” (332), thereby appreciating
“the relationship between the external and the internal as
coterminous and interconnected rather than binary and
hierarchical.” For him, Chinese rhetoric has all-too commonly
been understood - or misunderstood – through a very polarizing
comparison to Western rhetoric, which “privileges formal,
unchanging, and substantial understandings of the way things
are, and […] rejects any immediacies of experience and
imagination due to their failure to secure a single, objective
truth” (331). One of the conclusions that Mao offers at the end
of his introduction is that, very simply, “[I]t seems that the
tendency to appeal to binary characterizations shows little sign
of abating” (345). While he is writing out of a very particular
concern about a common representation of Chinese rhetoric,
because this arises because of the ideology of Western rhetoric,
it is a conclusion about the current state of the whole of
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