Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay
Brinson Leigh Kresge
9.2
In attempts to construct even breathing definitions, we must identify elements that occur within the lyric essay and examine how devices, such as repetition, are used and the subsequent effects they provoke. Doing such furthers the lyric essay’s cause and success, promotes more comprehensive analyses, and consciously sharpens repetition as a tool for writers to employ for definitive effect. I underscore the uniqueness and value of repetition as a tool for writers by fleshing out and categorizing its characteristics.
To that end, I am interested in the meaning that occurs in the divide between repetition’s definition and literary usage. Repetition, by definition, means the action of restating something that has already been said or written; this function implies replacement, where one can read significance into the necessity of the action. As an employed rhetorical strategy, repetition produces emphasis, clarity, amplification, or emotional impact; this stylistic perspective implies an amalgamated result. The divide between primary definition and strategy suggests two meaning-making opportunities, which, when in involute conjunction, demonstrate that repetition is never exclusively repetitive. Click here to continue reading. |
A Structural History of American Public Health Narratives:
Rereading Priscilla Wald’s Contagious and
Nancy Tomes’ Gospel of Germs amidst a 21st-Century Pandemic
Amy Mackin
9.2
I revisited the impressive work of these scholars two years into the most devastating pandemic in U.S. history—a public health crisis that further exposed the deep-seated racial, ethnic, and gender inequities of America in a way that, as Priscilla Wald and Nancy Tomes have shown, only a widespread and deadly communicable disease can. I reflected on disparities in healthcare access that resulted in disproportionate disease and death among Black, Brown, and poor communities, and I ruminated on the consequences of inconsistent messaging and political partisanship at the federal, state, and local levels (Noppert; Chen and Karim). It was impossible to ignore the repetition of histories that Wald and Tomes so effectively describe in their respective books. If public health narratives were tied to Cold War politics in the 1950s, as Wald asserts, then the viral rhetoric of the last three years was certainly tied to U.S.-China trade war politics. And if the urban poor bore both the brunt and the blame for tuberculosis spread at the turn of the twentieth century, as Tomes argues, so too were low-income city dwellers situated at the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak over 100 years later. Click here to continue reading.
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That Little Voice: The Outsized Power of a Child Narrator
Jeannine Ouellette
9.2
Such unknowing and surprise—arising from an especially elastic and incomplete relationship with language, and, therefore, meaning—are in part what make child narrators so compelling. Child narrators can, in the right circumstances, create effects, powerful ones, that other narrators simply cannot. Of course, not every project, especially within adult literature, calls for a child narrator. Only a few memoirs probably lend themselves to one, in light of how reflective memoirs tend—thanks to the conventions of the genre—to be. As for essays, Merriam-Webster defines them as “analytic” and “interpretive,” two traits not commonly associated with children. And yet, in certain situations, the voice of a child narrator can crack open a personal story—and world—like none other. Click here to continue reading.
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The Figure of the Diseuse in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee:
Language, Breaking Silences and Irigarayan Mysticism
Jennifer Lee Tsai
9.2
From the outset, Cha explicitly draws a connection between language and the body, the “ability and inability to speak.” The epigraph to Dictee testifies to the influence of Ancient Greek myth and lyric poetry in its reference to a quotation attributed to Sappho, “May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.” The later invocation to the Classical Muses, “O Muse, tell me the story/Of all these things, O Goddess, daughter of Zeus/Beginning where you wish, tell even us,” in itself a reworking of Hesiod’s invocation of the Muses in The Theogeny, situates the placing of epic and lyric traditions of poetry in juxtaposition. Click here to continue reading.
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