On Repetition

This edited volume frames repetition as a fundamental and dynamic dimension of Western cultural production. In 11 essays that engage with white Euro-American theatre, dance, performance art, stand-up comedy, visual art, craft, film, and poetry, contributors differently explore and enact the enduring tensions that mark repetition as a de/stabilizing force in the constitution of art, subjectivity, and social life. A unifying theme is the pleasure and difficulty of repetition’s returns. For example, Emma Bennett engages with repetition as a methodology to read and re-read the tension of waiting again and again for the punchline in Stewart Lee’s rambling, repetitive joke “The Rap Singers”; Alice Barnaby demonstrates that the repetitive, seemingly “pointless” domestic pastime of copying images through pin-pricking was a creative and critical practice of empiricism; and editor Eirini Kartsaki’s contribution ruminates on three examples of Books 197 subjects who repeatedly return to the same event, even as they enact a desire for and fear of the end of this return. These pieces point to the formal strength of this work: each chapter repeats and revises repetition as a concept and method, performatively undoing the reader’s attempts to resolve the question of repetition with each iteration.