The Paradoxical Status of Repetition

Bibliographic Data

ID5145185
AuthorsShlomith Rimmon-Kenan (corresponding author)
Year1980
Volume1
Issue4
Pages151
Publication date1980-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePoetics Today (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1771892
OpenAlexW2317303038
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited4

The purpose of this paper is to clear ground for a poetics of repetition, leaving actual development of such a poetics for another, much larger, study. It may seem strange that a clearing of ground should take form of paradoxes, but such is nature of phenomenon as well as of symbolic order (Lacan, 1966) to which it belongs. Such also is nature of self-reflexive and self-doubting theories which this article follows: Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, and so-called Yale School. Like them, I shall point out some aporias that semiotics cannot escape, and like them (though not like strawman they sometimes become), I shall present these paradoxes not as a rejection of semiotic analysis but as the name of a question (for a similar view of deconstruction, see Culler, 1979:137-141). Although repetition (in broad sense of happening, doing, experiencing, saying over again) permeates nature, human life, various arts (music, painting, dance, literature) and many disciplines (philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, education, communication theory, linguistics, poetics), I shall restrict myself here to two kinds of narrative texts: prose fiction and discourse of unconscious. The similarities that may emerge from joint consideration of two may be illuminating for both and have become thinkable owing to contemporary, linguistically oriented, return to Freud by Lacan and his followers in France as well as in USA

Linguistics · Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy · Psychology

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