Power Relations Between Speaker And Audience

Speech, an artistic activity, plays a significant and irreplaceable role in this age of globalization. In order to make, interpret and appreciate speeches better, we need the instruction of the rhetorical criticism of speech (RCS). However, the tradition of RCS is overwhelmingly West-centered, and traditions from other cultures are discriminatorily ignored. Therefore, this thesis attempts to compare the RCS in the Western tradition with that in the Chinese tradition and find out their similarities and differences, and meanwhile to detect how they may influence cross-cultural rhetorical interaction in speech.By surveying the evolution of rhetoric, speech and RCS in both West and China, this paper discovers that China and the West shared lots of rhetorical ideas about speech in the axial age. However, after the different developments in the long history from the axial age to the twentieth century, the Chinese RCS declined gradually, while the Western RCS experienced a full development and invented a set of comparatively mature theories. After the survey, the paper proposes that the essence of the Western RCS is to study the rhetorical interaction in terms of power relations between speaker and audience, which differs it from the RCS in the Chinese tradition.To illustrate the influence of those similarities and differences on cross-cultural speech, this paper analyzes two speeches: one is American President Bill Clinton's speech at Beijing University, the other is Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji's speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their cases show that speech is actually a kind of rhetorical interaction, in whose process the audience usually takes the upper hand while the speaker is comparatively at a disadvantage. The audience plays a pivotal role in determining the speaker's behavior and the outcome of the speech. Nevertheless, the speaker can appeal to various rhetorical means, such as identification and coercion, to influence the power relations between them. These two case studies also demonstrate that cultural differences, especially different traditions of RCS, may impact a lot on the power relations in the cross-cultural speech, so that comparative rhetoric plays an important part in cross-cultural speech.At last, this paper provides Chinese speaker and audience with some salutary references and hopes that it may invoke due attention to rhetoric, arouse more interest in comparative RCS, and launch a voyage of comparative rhetorical criticism, in its real sense, in speech.