Culture and Creativity Seminar – From Propaganda and Poetry to the Titles of Papers: On the Insinuating Effects of Alliteration, Rhythm and Rhyme
Speaker: Paul MageeDate\Time: Thursday 23 April 2026, 12:30-13:30Location: Building 1 Level A Room 1A21, ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ of Canberra (NB Room 1a21 is accessed from the foyer joining Building 1 and Mizzuna café); or Zoom: http://zoom.us/j/95029077504 AbstractWhy 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, Bagchi and 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? The paper turns to a second potential explanation for the truth-effects engendered by prosody, in this case from philosophy. Common to all these examples of musical language, Dickinson included, is their sight-readability. But the gains this leads to are not just in processing time. As the poetic cases in particular help us to see, the rhythmic sway of such texts induces us to read or say them as if we mean them, even if we do not yet know what they mean. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s counter-intuitive arguments as to the locus of conviction are adduced at this point. Where, he asks, do we hold the sense of meaning it, in those instances where we truly mean what we say? He suggests (1958) that it might be nowhere other than ‘the modulation of the voice in which we speak the words; or one of the processes similar to this, like the play of facial expression’. The possibility, in short, is that poetry, and by extension propaganda and promotion, attack us at the superficial and pervasively meaningful level of face and voice.BioPaul 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 ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ of Canberra. The Culture and Creativity Seminar Series is hosted by the Centre for Cultural and Creative Research (CCCR), Faculty of Arts and Design, ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ of Canberra. To discover upcoming seminars, please follow us on Facebook @uccccr, or Instagram and Twitter @uc_cccr. Alternatively, join our mailing list by emailing cccr@canberra.edu.au. Any questions and accessibility requests please contact: cccr@canberra.edu.au.
