The Art of Repetition in Muriel Spark’s Telling

Abstract

This chapter focuses on repetition in extended prose fiction with a view to achieving two things. First, it seeks to capture significant facets of Muriel Spark’s narrative style and draw out patterns in her exploitation of the reader’s cognitive processes. Second, the interest is in developing a greater understanding of the aesthetics of an extended narrative in pragmatic terms from a relevance-theoretic perspective (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Clark 1996, 2013; Pilkington 2000). Given the nature of inferencing, we are therefore examining the contribution required of the reader in the construction of narrative and its aesthetic effects (Toolan 2001; Fabb 2002). I examine lexical, sentential and section repetition in three of Spark’s most acclaimed novels and, in the final section, consider briefly a pragmatic account of re-reading (Furlong 1996, 2008).