Toiveikkaan talvimielen mainosretoriikka
Aisteihin vetoavan kuvakielen suostutteluvoimasta Veikko Huovisen Hamstereissa
Abstract
The Marketing Rhetoric of Hopeful Winter Spirit. Persuasive Power and Appeal to Senses in the Imagery of Veikko Huovinen’s Hamsterit
This article offers a rhetorical reading of Veikko Huovinen’s Hamsterit (”The Hamsters”, 1957). I view the protagonist Hamsteri as a persuasive orator, whose eloquent speeches enhance the mundane practice of gathering winter storage with his literature-influenced aesthetics of survival in the arctic wild. While I focus my analysis on Hamsteri’s speeches, I also consider how authorial designs, the narrator, and other characters echo and complement each other and participate in Hamsteri’s rhetorical and aesthetic effort in a way that creates a poetics of unanimity into the novel, thus powerfully inviting also the reader to join the unanimity.
I see similarities between Hamsteri’s rhetoric and TV commercials. is similarity is based on Hamsteri’s vivid imagery, which appeals to all the five senses in order to attach positive associations to the food and clothing that he persuades his friend Rurik to buy, when they prepare for the winter. A recurring device in Hamsteri’s speeches is the speculative description, which grows from vivid imagery and embeds micro stories into the main narrative, while also giving full freedom for his comically imaginative speculations.
In surveying the comic aspects of Hamsteri’s speculative descriptions, I combine narratological and stylistic analysis by employing both the audience concepts of rhetorical narratology and the classical rhetorical figures as my conceptual tools.
