Higher life: The rhetorical profile of the highlife song text

Abstract

This study interrogates the highlife song text’s rhetorical profile as a layered proposition. The thesis of this research is that the rhetorical profile of the highlife song text is realizable in a multi- dimensional context which uses both the verbal and the non-verbal as its medium. The focus of the study’s investigation is on how the song text articulates its rhetoric via the musical, the literary and the socio-cultural – the constituents of its envisioned three-dimensional rhetorical profile. Using a combination of semiotic, reader-response, and performance theories as its theoretical framework, the research examines the dynamics that underpin the song text’s rhetorical expressiveness as a synthesis of its verbal, non-verbal and derivative texts. It attempts to establish the gestalt that is the rhetorical profile of the highlife song text. The significance of this research is to expose the unique ways in which the highlife song text articulates its rhetoric, in the hope of opening a new window of interrogation on the highlife song text as a worthy object of literary study. It is also to participate in the scholarly discourse on Ghanaian popular culture with a view to its further enrichment.