The Way, Multimodality of Ritual Symbols, and Social Change: Reading Confucius’s Analects as a Rhetoric Xiaoye You Department of English, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA Most rhetorical readings of Confucius’s Analects have focused on his views on eloquence, reflecting an insuppressible impulse among com- parative rhetoricians to match Confucian rhetoric to Greco–Roman rhe- torical framework. My reading of the text argues that Confucius was more concerned about the suasory power of the multimodality of ritual symbols than narrowly verbal persuasion. To achieve the Way for restor- ing social unity and peace, Confucius emphasizes the ritualization of both the self and the others through studying history and performing rituals reflectively. I suggest, as the first Chinese rhetoric par excellence, the Analects shares some similar features with epideictic rhetoric. Comparative rhetoricians have shown great interest in Confucius’s Analects during recent years, concurring that it is an important treatise in non-Western rhetoric. For example, in Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks, recently edited by Lipson and Binkley, all three essays in the section of ‘‘Chinese rhetoric’’ heavily reference the Analects. The special attention devoted to this ancient text is well deserved. The text heralds a rhetorical tradition that dominated Chinese and other East Asian societies for two thousand years. Even today, Confucian rhetorical strategies continue to be favorably deployed in both Chinese politics and Chinese composition instruction (Li ‘‘Good Writing’’; Lu ‘‘The Influence’’; You). A close examination of the text not only promises a better understanding of Chinese rhetoric, but also, through comparative analysis, sheds light on other rhetorical traditions. The effort to read the Analects closely is warranted; however, the rhetorical reading itself has been rather unsettled. Over the last three Address correspondence to Xiaoye You, Penn State University, Department of English, 112 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: xuy10@psu.edu Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 36:425–448, 2006 Copyright # The Rhetoric Society of America ISSN: 0277-3945 print=1930-322X online DOI: 10.1080/02773940600868028 425