A Brief Historical Journey from Contrastive Rhetoric to Intercultural Rhetoric- A Promising Interdisciplinary Field of Research

This chapter first presents a critical historical overview of contrastive rhetoric (CR) as a research area that rose within the second language writing field. CR is described as a field that maintains each language has unique rhetorical conventions, tries to identify these unique cultural conventions through cross- cultural textual studies and explains the L2 writing difficulties by referring to transfer from the first language (Connor, 1996, p. 5). However, later, CR was envisioned as an interdisciplinary field drawing on theories and research methods from second language acquisition, composition and rhetoric, anthropology, translation studies, linguistic discourse analysis, and genre analysis (Connor, 1996; 2004). Due to the harsh criticisms, contrastive rhetoric has been recently renamed as “Intercultural Rhetoric” and broadly redefined. Intercultural Rhetoric allows a broader vision of the field, which embraces not only the cross- cultural studies, including the traditional text, genre, and corpus analysis studies but also “the studies of interactions in intercultural settings, " “the analysis of accommodations made by second- language writers, " and the ethnographic approaches that examine language in interactions, dynamic definitions of culture and the role of the cultural contexts in the shaping of texts (Connor, 2004a, 2004b). The chapter discusses the challenges and criticisms original contrastive rhetoric research faced and offers new research opportunities within the intercultural rhetoric concept by considering the inherent difficulties in cross- cultural rhetorical studies.