Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion.

Similar in many ways, and likewise deserving of multiple stars (about six) in our categorization, is Jeffrey Will's [Repetition.sup.**] in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion.(2) This is a book not so much about Derridean iterability but about formalist figurae such as anaphora, gemination, polyptoton, and so on, and the role they play in the `marking' of language as poetic. The quasi-scientific jargon involved in the designations of various types of word-repetition, for which W. gives a helpful if not easy analysis of his strategies and criteria, might risk leading to a kid of interpretative absolutism, the sort of rigid stylometrics which critics like Stanley Fish have so forcefully opposed (as W. acknowledges in a number of places). But in fact W. explicitly positions himself against the view that these figures have an inherent meaning (e.g., 7, 16, 33), stressing rather that they may encourage readers into acts of interpretation. The complex structures of repetition displayed here do not appear only for their ovrn sake', but rather they comprise a grammar of allusion -- how repetition within a text evokes that in other texts. This is tremendously important, for `intertextuality' is stiff one of the big issues in classical literary criticism. How far an individual case of repetition (even of a particular category of repetition) is to be held to evoke any other individual case, however, is not clear. I suspect that a reading of ancient literature in which all these sorts of repetitions (or at least an cases of co-ordinated polyptoton, or whatever) have the potential to evoke each other directly is one in which all sorts of other literary features would do so as well, and would produce a very complex web of intertextuality. That may well be appropriate. I do find it a little difficult to see how so many instances could be held in …