On Matsuda-Atkitson's Little Chit Chat

Matsuda and Atkinson's platonic conversation sort of fills in many ways the gaps I sensed in Kaplan's article. They make me appreciate Kaplan' ideas even more for what he has come up with more than 40 years ago. Although many scholars seem to be poking at him, they have at the same time given so much credit to what he has built. However, with no intention of being disrespectful to Kaplan’s early enlightening contribution to multicultural rhetoric, Matsuda’s argument is justified saying that Kaplan’s 1966 article has received so much attention that people forget the fact that in order to have a solid and comprehensive CR theoretical ground, things do not have to revolve around Kaplan's article.

Reading Kaplan's is one thing, reading Matsuda and Atkinson's is another. I am still left with burning curiosity in my mind as to where we are headed. Matsuda proposes two major shifts in the way we look at CR. First, since CR does not provide satisfactory conditions for it to be a distinct field, we need to move away from the already accepted view of what the currently understood CR holds. This can be done either by abandoning the term or finding a safe spot somewhere between CR and comparative rhetoric. This is a combination of multiple foci: textual features, humanity, and others. Second, a more radical approach of post-modernism, dissolving (Atkinson's term) the whole thing and let other well-established fields adopt and develop its pieces is at least not beyond reach.

Either way, I too believe that CR is a dynamic concept that should not take orders from any one. If revolutionary steps are necessary in order to make changes in people's lives and in the way the world operates then be it. If we accept that there are multiple literacies, then why can’t there be multiple rhetorical traditions or dimensions? Reducing CR to including only its textual features is, I believe, obscuring the visibility of the whole forest of rhetoric and misleading to teaching and research.