Conclusion

The conclusion considers how repetition has shaped the structures of commonness and strangeness through which we have come to know our current era. Rejecting repetition, it turns instead to what Gertrude Stein called “insistence”––whereby each repetition transforms and is transformed by the form and context of its presentation. Repetition can come to be seen differently when approached through the rhetorical strategies of continuous reframing—the poetics of insistence and encounter—explored here: Yang Lian’s superimposition and constellation, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s co-response, Lyn Hejinian’s everyday estrangement, Bei Dao’s allegory and echo, Dmitri Prigov’s intersecting iterations, and Charles Bernstein’s affective immediacy and distancing artifice. When seen through the cross-cultural encounters and poetries wrought by the passage from the Cold War world to our current era of globalization, history appears not as repeated waves of influence, of sameness and dif­ference, but as insistence across space and time, language and culture.