Abstract
Why do political slogans so regularly resort to rhyme? Why does alliteration play the prominent role it does in advertising? According to one study, ‘Two T-shirts for $21’ clearly outsells ‘2 T-shirts for $19’ (Davis, Bagchiand Block 2015). The presentation starts by considering social science explanations for the emphasis accorded to such seemingly childish devices in our public communications. Ideas to do with fluency of cognitive processing, and the gains these lead to in liking and perceived trustworthiness, are considered and then supplemented with notions from the field of poetics. The connection long mooted in that field (e.g. Attridge 1995) between rhythmic language and the sense of collective utterance is evoked and connected to ideas of social proof, viz. the principle (Cialdini 2009) that the more people who seem to be acting / speaking a certain way, the more reasonable their conduct will appear. That such collectivist intimations can pertain to even the most idiosyncratic of lyric utterances provides an interesting counter-angle on the forms of majoritarian behavioural modification tracked in political and commercial fields so far in the paper. Might Emily Dickinson’s strangest thoughts become—for the very fact that they are couched in musical form—thereby more thinkable, reasonable, assumable?
Bio
Paul Magee studied in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. He writes poetry and has published extensively on the history, ethnography and philosophy of poetic composition, the links between orality and writing, and the relationship between creativity and traumatic thought. Paul’s involvement in socially-impactful deployment of Creative Arts workshops for wellbeing and repair includes his decade-long role as a Co-Investigator on the Defence ARRTS Programme, which helps ill and injured service people to find a creative voice, and his work with Indigenous communities as a member of the Story Ground team, which is dedicated to Writing on Country. Paul’s latest monograph is Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (Bloomsbury, 2022). His second book of verse, Stone Postcard, was named in Australian Book Review as one of the books of the year for 2014. Paul is Professor of Poetry and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR) at the University of Canberra.
This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to PaulMagee_Presentation.pptx