Repetition, Recurrence, Returns: How Cultural Renewal Works

by Vincent Barletta (Contribution by), Günter Blamberger (Contribution by), Christiane Brosius (Contribution by), Michael B. Buchholz (Contribution by), Isabel Capeloa Gil (Contribution by)

Overview

Repetition is constitutive of human life. Both the species and the individual develop through repetition. Unlike simple recall, repetition is permeated by the past and the present and is oriented toward the future. Repetition of central actions and events plays an important role in the lives of individuals and the life of society. It helps to create meaning and memory. Because repetition is a central aspect of human life, it plays a role in all social and cultural spheres. It is important for several branches of the humanities and social studies. This book presents studies of an array of repetitive phenomena and to show that repetition analysis is opening up a new field of study within single disciplines and interdisciplinary research. Recommended for scholars of literature, music, culture, and communication.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498593991
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/29/2019
Series:	Transforming Literary Studies
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Joan Ramon Resina is professor of comparative literature and of Iberian cultures at Stanford University.

Christoph Wulf is professor of anthropology and education at Freie Universität Berlin.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction

Part 1. Human Development: Memory and Self-Transformation in Ritual and Mimetic Processes

Chapter 1. Repetition of the Self in Memory and Anticipation

Joan Ramon Resina

Chapter 2. Repetition and Reenactment in Rituals

Axel Michaels

Chapter 3. Repetitions and Difference in Physical, Mimetic, and Ritual Processes

Christoph Wulf

Chapter 4. Repetition, Training, Exercise: From Plato’s Care of the Soul to the Contemporary Self-Help Industry

Almut-Barbara Renger

Part 2. The Need to Repeat: Education, Rhetoric, and Conversation

Chapter 5. The Need to Repeat: Young Children’ Reliving of Stories

Ursula Stenger, Translated by James Garrison

Chapter 6. Re-Petition in (Therapeutic) Conversation: A Psychoanalyst’s Perspective Using Conversation Analysis

Michael B. Buchholz

Chapter 7. Notes on Rhetoric and Repetition in Tourism

Stephanie Malia Hom

Part 3. Creativity: Rhythm and Repetition

Chapter 8. Etoku (会得) and Rhythms of Nature

Shoko Suzuki

Chapter 9. The Births of Rhythm: John Dewey and Aesthetic Form

Vincent Barletta

Chapter 10. Repeating Sound, Sounding Repetition in Music

Tiago de Oliviera Pinto

Chapter 11. Gertrud Stein on Serial Repetition

Ulla Haselstein

Part 4. Aesthetics: Repetition and Creation of Art

Chapter 12. Creativity and Repetition. Some Notes on the Practice and Cultural Discourses of Literary Creativity

Günter Blamberger

Chapter 13. The Compulsion to Be Cruel: Contemporary Returns

Isabel Capeloa Gil

Chapter 14. Leap into the Open Sky: Political Theater as a Return to the Past

Matthias Warstat

Chapter 15. The Domestication of Sound: On the Generativity of Repetition

Holger Schulze

Chapter 16. “Let’s do it again?!”: Shaping “Global” Art Production in Urban Nepal

Christiane Brosius

Index

About the Editors

About the Contributors

Editorial Reviews

Mental innovation is usually associated with the ability to forget the past. In order to create new thoughts or new events, it seems necessary to free oneself from the past and to make a kind of tabula rasa. This book demonstrates the contrary. Because our imagination is necessarily dialogic and requests the best possible answer from the world or from the other, it needs to be enriched permanently by the past. This enrichment is conditioning our creativity, our ability to find the new thoughts or new events that fulfill ourselves as much as we desire. Our creations are always re-harmonizing the best of our past with our drive to the future and to the accomplishment of ourselves. Reading Repetition, Recurrences, Returns will teach us how to insert these memory games in our conversation with ourselves and with our human fellows. It will help you to reinforce your creative power.

Jacques Poulain

This highly recommended book identifies nothing less than a new riddle of the Sphinx: What animal embraces mimesis; rejects repetition in the quest for freedom; and grasps for reproducibility in the face of unpredictability? The authors offer unexpected insights into this enigma and, in the process, open the human condition to sobering inspection.

Charles Stewart