Repetition as a literary event
Marlene Dirschauer
Kommentar
As a literary device used for emphasis and to highlight the relationship between different lexical, acoustic, and semantic units, repetition often points to the very literariness of a text; as such, it can serve as a useful entry point for the reader to make sense of what they read. Moreover, repetition has always been closely bound up with story-telling and rhetoric – many rhetorical figures such as alliteration, anaphora, epanalepsis, epizeuxis, and polyptoton are based on the principle of repetition, while certain forms of lyric poetry crucially depend on repeating patterns such as rhythm, rhyme and refrain. This seminar uses the ubiquity of the phenomenon in literary works to look at a variety of texts from the sixteenth century to the present day to explore repetition as a literary event: What happens in and to a text when words, ideas, images, sounds, and emotions are expressed multiple times? What is the effect of repetition, and how can we use it to better understand the poetic workings and generic structure of a text? The readings will include lyric poetry ranging from Mary Sidney, George Herbert, John Donne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Emily Dickinson to Maya Angelou and Amanda Gorman; narrative prose by Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens; and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The seminar aims to enhance participants’ skills in rhetorical analysis and the core competence of close reading.
Schließen13 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung