| My thesis is that communal singing, with its narrative and psychagogic (aesthetic and physiological) dimensions, is a form of symbolic inducement that can lead to an experience of community. To state it another way, types of discourse that are characterized by patterning, when performed in a group, exhibit special psychagogic properties and therefore are uniquely rhetorical for constructing a shared reality.; In this dissertation I show that this is what I believe happened in Lawrence, Massachusetts at the famous 1912 textile strike in which 25,000 workers, led by the Industrial Workers of the World, mounted a successful action against mill owners---an action that was unusually and notably marked by frequent episodes of communal singing. The narrative stories and aesthetic impact of the songs those workers sang, as well as the physical experiences of both hearing them and singing them in unison, I believe created a shared sense of fantasy such as that described by Ernest Bormann in his theory of symbolic convergence. I submit that those fantasies induced the development of a community that the workers of Lawrence---representing dozens of ethnicities and speaking at least 45 different dialects, and who, as a body, harbored and demonstrated profound interethnic antagonisms---had never before experienced, nor would ever have been likely to, had they not engaged repeatedly in episodes of group singing.; I suggest that symbolic convergence theory, which is concerned with discourse's potential to induce the shared reality that occurs when group members share a common fantasy and vision, currently fails to acknowledge the suasory effects of psychagogy, and I suggest that the theory would be enriched by adding explicit consideration of patterned, rhythmic discourse, particularly that which is jointly performed. More broadly, I suggest that rhetorical criticism explore and incorporate the influence that such discourse can have over the experiences of individuals who enact that discourse. This invites a focus within the discipline of rhetoric that will be weighted more toward concerns of style and less toward the more conventionally understood rationalistic aspect of discourse and the pragmatic rhetorics with which it is associated. In modifying the focus thusly, the ways we think of rhetoric would come to reflect more on its roots, which are in song, poetry, and epideictic discourse. |
