"Guiguzi," China's First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary (Landmarks in Rhetoric and Public Address) First Edition

This translation is heavily annotated, a necessity for this remarkable and difficult text.This text is difficult even for a native Chinese reader, however the advice contained within and the system advocated is relevant even today. While the far more famous Analects (Lunyu) warns against clever speech, Guiguzi actually shows how it is done. Anyone who wishes to understand from a classical Chinese perspective how rhetoric works could hardly do better than reading this amazing book.As an added bonus, there is also a fascinating study titled "Under Western Eyes" within that compares and contrasts Western Rhetoric with that found in China. Even if you're more interested in Western Rhetoric, this book is worth the price alone for that study.

Very interesting!

The translator supposes that this book is written by a wise old man named Guiguzi, who lived in the Warring States period (and taught other famous figures, such as Sun Bin 孫臏, Zhang Yi 張儀, and Su Qin 蘇秦). Her introduction should have at least discussed the reasons why virtually no one else in the field believes this. She writes: "The general consensus is that the first eleven chapters were composed by one person, presumably Guiguzi" (p. 10). That is absolutely not the general consensus. I'm not sure that there is a general consensus, but there are good reasons why many scholars suspect that the whole thing is a first-millennium forgery retroactively attributed to a shadowy master with a commensurately shadowy name (Master of the Valley of Ghosts). The translator owed it to her readers to give these viewpoints a fair hearing.An analogy: if we're presented with a book by allegedly "Aristotle" (roughly coeval with the legendary Guiguzi), we would be a little disappointed to learn that it's really a text by some anonymous forger from around the time of St. Augustine.

I wanted to get an understanding of how the Chinese approached rhetoric as opposed to the western/Aristotelian approach. To have a chance of understanding even a part of this book, one needs to be versed in Taoist fundamentals (ie. The LaoZi). I was watching the show series Qin Empire Alliance (series 1 and 2). It was stated in the show that “we’ll never fathom the true depths of Guiguzu.” And I agree, because I find the text too deep and mysterious.