On the Materiality of Repetition

Abstract

Repetition is a complex yet extremely common textual phenomenon that has caught the scholarly eye’s attention since classical times, as orators were first trying to sketch out and present their perfected rhetorical devices to students. In more recent years, repetition has been extensively studied in the context of orality and popular poetry, among other things; in this context, repetition has been recognized to aid memorization and performative composition. This paper aims to support the hypothesis that repetition can be regarded as a device with something of a material nature. More specifically, drawing upon the various ways artists and scholars have utilized to describe and apply the device in question, we shall point out certain purely material functions of repetition in texts. Traditionally, repetition has been analyzed in quite simplistic manners, which resulted in it being regarded as a fault of style, or a way of generating plain emphasis in literary and non-literary texts alike. Our goal is to reframe the debate and distance our argumentation from strictly linguistic or rhetorical approaches to textual meaning. We are thus treating repetition in fresh methodological terms, basing our approach on aspects of memorization, reader-text communication, and textual mapping; this leads us to acknowledging repetition’s peculiar relevance (both resemblance and dissimilarity) to material media.