On Repetition

Eirini Kartsaki is a teaching fellow in theatre and performance studies at Queen Mary University of London. She is also the editor of On Repitition.

• Persisting Forever: Introducing Repetition Eirini Kartsaki Chapter 1 - Of Secret Signals, Absent Masters and the Trembling of the Contours: 15Walter Benjamin, Yvonne Rainer and the Repeatability of GestureSwen Steinhäuser Chapter 2 - All the Home’s a Stage: Uncanny Encounters Between Auditorium and Oikos Alan Read Chapter 3 - Repetition as Technology of the Numinous in Performance: The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramovic´Silvia Battista Chapter 4 - When Is a Joke not a Joke? Reading (and Re-reading) Stewart Lee’s ‘The Rap Singers’ Emma Bennett Chapter 5 - The Crying Channel Claire Hind and Gary Winters Chapter 6 -The Cyclical Pleasures and Deaths of Symbolization: How to Become 117 a Cupcake/The Famous’ Adaptation of Frankenstein Lauren Barri Holstein Chapter 7 - A Pointless Pastime? Early Nineteenth-Century Pin-Prick ImageryAlice Barnaby Chapter 8 - Repeated Acts of Intimacy and Harm in Andrea Brady’s Mutability: Scripts for Infancy Gareth Farmer Chapter 9 -‘I Was Not HEARD’: Trauma and Articulation in the Poetry of Geraldine Monk Linda Kemp Chapter 10 - Déjà-vu, Doubles and Dread: The Uncanny and Christopher Smith’s Triangle Ruth McPhee Chapter 11 - Farewell to Farewell: Impossible Endings and Unfinished Finitudes Eirini Kartsaki Afterword: Repetition or Recognition? Clare Foster

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.