2.1 Review of relevant literature .1 The concept of discourse
2.1.3 Epistolary genre
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Segers (1985) is also related to our study in its concern with pastoral letters in the Roman Catholic Church. However, Segers examines the American Roman Catholic bishops‘ pastoral letter on War and Peace from a feminist perspective rather than from a linguistic perspective. She looks at the letter from the point of view of a consideration of the role of women in the consultative process that produced the letter, and analyses the content of the letter to assess its impact, where appropriate, on questions of justice and equality of the sexes. She concludes that women‘s involvement in the letter is minimal. The present study which is a rhetorical analysis of selected Roman Catholic bishops‘ pastoral letters in Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province of Nigeria is a shift of focus from other forms of religious discourse to pastoral letter which has not received adequate consideration from scholars on the language and style of Christian religion, with the result that the persuasive properties of the letters have not been explored.
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‗material‘ for a range of strategies, language uses, and technological functions aimed at creating an imagined sense of presence. She further explains that reference to the physical body, to the scene of writing, to the place where the letter is received, or postal technology are often used by letter writers to convey and invoke a sense of immediacy, intimacy and presence. The correspondents strive to collapse the time and distance that separate them.
Corroborating this view, MacLean (2005) states that epistolary genre creates a bond of intimacy and sense of collaboration, between reader and author, which is not characteristic of other genres.
Another related epistolary convention identified by Milne (n.d) is one where the materiality of the letter is made to stand for the correspondent‘s body. She observes that due to its physical proximity or contact with its author, the letter can work metonymically; a function most obvious in amorous epistolary discourse where the letter is kissed, held, and cried over or adored in place of the lover‘s body. In this way the gap between letter writer and reader seems bridged. Paradoxically, therefore, the letter form allows the correspondents to enact an identity and even adopt a persona that may differ from their
‗real‘ or lived body and personae.
Patterson (2000) expresses the view that letters are used to maintain and consolidate interpersonal relations and social circle identity. According to him, the aim of continuing epistolary discourse is to lessen the interpersonal distance between writer and addressee by increasing intimacy, and the greater the intimacy, the more affectionate the formulae and names used in the salutations and subscriptions. He also adds that, because letters are poised between a past transaction, face-to-face or epistolary, and a desired future one, the body frequently refers, in the opening, to the previous meeting or letter. Also, just before the close of the letter in the farewell section, a writer will often send greetings to the reader‘s family members and/or to other intimate members of the social circle around the writer and the reader. Regarding this sense of epistolary intimacy and confidentiality, epistolary genre becomes an adequate form that will enable the Catholic bishops to achieve their aim of influencing the moral lives of the faith community they are writing to: the Igbo Catholic faithful in Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province.
Altman (1982) identifies, as another feature of epistolary discourse, the presence of a unique ‗I‘-‗you‘ relationship, which makes it possible for the addressee to reciprocate by initiating his own utterance; the original ‗you‘ becomes the ‗I‘ of a new utterance.
According to him, the ‗I‘- ‗you‘ relationship in epistolary discourse is essential to the maintenance of epistolary exchange, and it shapes the language used. Altman adds that, like
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the diary writer, the writer of an epistolary discourse is anchored in a present time from where he looks towards the past and future events, and also that the temporal aspect of any given epistolary statement is relative to innumerable moments: the actual time that an act described is performed; the moment when it is written down; the respective times that the letter is despatched, received, read or reread.
In numerous instances, the basic formal and functional characteristics of epistolary genre, far from being merely ornamental, significantly influence the way meaning is consciously and unconsciously constructed by the writers and readers of epistolary works.
This is likely to be the case with the Catholic bishops‘ pastoral letters which we are concerned with here.
Existing studies on epistolary religious genre are scanty, compared to studies on other religious genres. In his examination of the genre of the New Testament letters, Bratcher (online n.d), for example, observes that most of the New Testament letters follow the epistolary genre conventions in the Greco-Roman and Jewish tradition. Citing an example with St. Paul‘s letter to the Philippians, he shows how the letter fits into the following pattern of Greco-Roman letters, which consists of four general elements:
opening salutation containing writer‘s name, recipient‘s name, and a greeting
a prayer, blessing, or thanksgiving
the body of the letter
final greetings and farewell.
He, however, observes that the Greco-Roman letters did not have to follow the form exactly, and that there could be various modifications of the elements according to the purposes of the writer, as in the case of Paul‘s letter to the Churches in Galatia. According to him, Paul‘s modification of the general pattern, that is, his omission of the prayer/blessing/thanksgiving section, helps to communicate his distress with the Galatians for their failure to live up to the preaching of the Gospel. Bratcher notes that, in other cases, the omission of features of the letter, as in the case of the Book of Hebrews, James, 2 Peter and 1 John, may be a clue that the writing is not an actual letter but a treatise, a sermon, or some other type of writing cast in the literary structure of a letter, and this is especially true if it lacks the salutation and the final greetings, which are personal elements that one would expect in a true letter.
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Of course, the Greco-Roman pattern of letter writing, as seen in the biblical letters, is quite different from that of modern letter writing, which consists of seven instead of four elements, and these include:
the heading, which may be in form of letter-head or the writer‘s address
the date
the recipient‘s address, in the case of formal letters
the opening salutation
the body of the letter
the closing salutation
the signature
Other supplements, such as the attention line, the subject line, the typist‘s reference, and the enclosure notation, are included in formal letters when the need for them arises.
Similar to Bratcher (n.d) is Smith (2010) which investigates the epistolary form in the Book of Mormon, identifying eight letters extant in the book as follows:
1. Moroni to Ammoron 2. Ammoron to Moroni I 3. Helman I to Moroni I 4. Moroni I to Pahoran I 5. Pahoran I to Moroni I 6. Giddianhi to Lachoneus I 7. Mormon II to Moroni II 8. Mormon II to Moroni II
According to Smith, the most noticeable thing about the first six of these eight letters, which are war epistles, is that despite the possible absence of the formal address due to the narrative context in which they are embedded, they never violate the ancient Hittite-Syrian, Neo-Assyrian, Amarna and Hebrew format in which the superior correspondent is always listed first. Smith further observes that rather than have the superior- inferior sequence always at the formal opening, five of the six letters simply have the superior at the beginning and list the inferior at the close (regardless of sender-recipient order). Also, as observed by Smith, some of the war epistles naturally delete any sort of nice greeting or blessing--even substituting invective or threats, but none of these seems to be the case for letters 7 and 8. Opening greetings, Smith continues, immediately followed by a
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remembrance and/or a wish for good health as is characteristic of Hellenistic style, are distinguished in letters 3, 6 and 7. Thanksgiving or blessing form is present only in letter 7, closing greetings in only letters 5 and 7, while a doxology and benediction are present at the close of letters 3, 5and 8. Smith (2010) further states that, generally, Book of Mormon letters use transition words, such as And now, toindicatethebeginning and various dimensions of the body of the letter, as is characteristic of Hebrew and Aramaic letters.
Roman Catholic bishops‘ pastoral letters, however, follow the Greco-Roman conventions just like the New Testament letters.