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Melody,
Imagery and Memory
Prof.
Roy Jeal
Among the ways texts seem to be persuasive are by means of the musicality of the language employed, by the ways in which visual images are cast upon the imagination and by the stirring of ideas implicit in audience members’ memories. In 1927 poet and literary critic Ezra Pound wrote an essay titled “How to Read” in which he addressed these rhetorical features, claiming that they “charge” or “energize” language with meaning. He named them melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia. This essay takes up these features (or textures) of language as they appear relative to moral persuasion in the letters of Paul. It focuses on the ways in which sound patterns and rhythms of speech, physical imagery, and expectations of what words mean induce an emotional response that helps move people to be receptive to exhortation and to the practice of the behaviors being encouraged. The paper examines such usages of language in some selected passages from the Pauline Corpus in order to see their functional role in Paul’s moral persuasion. It demonstrates how the rhetoric of sound, image and memory sets the emotional stage for audiences to shift their thinking to considerations of appropriate behaviour.
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