What Is Repetition in Literature?

Repetition is not redundancy. In literature, repetition changes meaning with every occurrence.

Definition

Repetition in literature is the deliberate recurrence of a word, phrase, sound, or structural element. It is a rhetorical and poetic device with a long history: anaphora (repeating the same phrase at the start of successive clauses), epistrophe (at the end), refrain (in poetry and song).

What repetition does to meaning

Repetition does not produce sameness. When a word is encountered repeatedly, it begins to detach from its usual meaning — what linguists call semantic satiation. The word becomes sound before meaning; its strangeness surfaces. This is a feature of Beckett's prose and of the Archive's books: the word "ew", repeated for 261 pages, transforms in the reader's perception.

Repetition in experimental literature

Gertrude Stein's prose used repetition as its primary compositional device: "a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Each repetition is identical; each iteration changes what precedes it. The Archive's books operate in this tradition, but at novel length and with a single reaction word as the material.

The extreme case

The Archive's books represent the extreme case of literary repetition: one word, repeated throughout an entire book. This is both a literary experiment and a direct demonstration of what repetition does to language. The reader's experience of reading EW is also an experience of watching a word transform under the pressure of repetition.

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