Repetition and Semiotics: Interpreting Prose Poems

Excerpt from Chapter I “Formal Repetition and Literature”

“Repetition has a bad reputation. Repetition is stasis, it is boredom, it is death, cf. Freud. For the sake of originality or difference, it must be avoided at all costs. Repetition in literature is thus to many the sign of a dull mind, and of an even duller pen. As Malherbe implied in his commentaries on the baroque poet Desportes, repetition destroys good style.

“Since this “evil” is found, however, in the theoretical works of thinkers from Aristotle to Derrida, as well as in the literary productions of writers from the Greeks right down through the New Novelists, one has to ask whether it really deserves this bad reputation. Indeed, the entire history of rhetorical and stylistic studies would seem to underscore rather than to reject the fact that the iterative process is constitutive of the artistic work. One need only look, for instance, at the definition of repetition in a dictionary of rhetoric to realize the extraordinary importance accorded this phenomenon in the classification and characterization of rhetorical tropes. Be they text-based, or reader-based, as with the current vogue, the vast majority of critical attempts to describe the literary event depend on the perception of repetitive textual traits for their epistemological grounding. Regardless of what a given critic may say about a piece of literature, he or she would be literally at a loss for words if there were no prior notation, conscious or unconscious, of formal iteration.