Repetition as Trapped Emotion in Tennessee Williams’s the Glass Menagerie

Abstract

Repetition as a linguistic and stylistic device extensively used in Tennessee Williams’s plays has been noticed by many. At the same time, more psychologically-inclined scholars have frequently drawn parallels between Williams’s plays and his own experiences and emotional conflicts. In an attempt to combine the two perspectives, this article will explore the function of repetitions as indicators of trapped emotions in Williams’s celebrated and award-winning play The Glass Menagerie. Starting from the stylistic theoretical background, but at the same time taking into account the psychological insights into the link between Williams’s life and work through some basic concepts of Freud and Lacan, an attempt will be made to demonstrate that in this play linguistic repetition appears as an obsessive expression of the characters’ emotions as well as those of the dramatist himself, making him repeat and relive both his experiences and his emotions. The authors will first introduce the concept and functions of repetition as a linguistic and stylistic device and then explore its representative instances in individual characters and their meanings, ending with the parallels which can be drawn between the characters’ and the dramatist’s own experiences and emotions expressed or intensified through repetitions.

Adverbials of Time, Time Expressions and Tense Shifts in Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades”

“…It has been frequently researched in concrete literary discourse, where it materializes in a variety of functions, such as contributing to the creation of gothic effects, projecting trapped emotion, creating menacing atmosphere, enhancing violence, or preserving rhetorical effects in translation, etc. (Zupan 2006;Kusovac and Pralas 2016;Onič and Prajnč Kacijan 2019;Mohar, Orthaber, and Onič 2020;Plemenitaš 2020;Gadpaille and Zupan 2020, 18). Several of these studies also find that the effects of repetitive stylistic patterns are often affected by the translation process and the perception and interpretative potential of the target text is different, mostly narrower, than that of the original.…”

Repetition as a means of verbal and psychological violence in interrogation scenes from contemporary drama

“…In this study we will consider de Beaugrande and Dressler's understanding of the variety of repetitive patterns, since it has proven useful in previous studies (cf . Onič, Prajnč Kacijan, 2019;Kusovac, Pralas 2016;Zupan, 2006), as well as selected studies looking into repetition patterns in non-literary spoken discourse that resembles the discourse of drama in many ways -not in all of them, as pointed out by Short (2013, 173-181), but in several that are relevant for this analysis.…”