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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Samuel Jay Keyser, "Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts" (MIT Press, 2025)
Description: Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures, extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril.
In Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts (MIT Press, 2025), Samuel Jay Keyser explores in detail the way repetition works in poetry, music, and painting. He argues, for example, that the same cognitive function underlies both how poets write rhyme in metrical verse and the way songwriters like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (“Satin Doll”) and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“My Funny Valentine”) construct t...