« A peculiar poetical-like murmur » : répétition et poéticité dans The Mayor of Casterbridge by Annie Ramel

“…For a prose text to become poetic, the dimension of automaton must be at work, with the repetition of equivalent units, but the dimension of tuché must also come into play—the encounter with an unsymbolizable Real. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, it is the signifier « ring » which commemorates the traumatic moment when Henchard sold his wife on a fair (when she flung her wedding-ring in his face), a punctum effect (in the acoustic field) whose recurrence punctuates the text and produces all sorts of reverberations—repeated letters, alliterations, acoustic debris and fragments—whereby something of the « voice qua object » is overheard. …”
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Foreign Words in Victorian and Edwardian Literature by Emily Eells

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