Chewing: Goethe’s Proserpina

Abstract This article argues that Goethe reduced the rich myth of Proserpina to a sequence of pure repetitions, which in their various forms then dominate the entire text of the drama. Goethe reproduces the myth as a rhetorical skeleton or, rather, as the skeleton of rhetoric. Put differently, Goethe’s Proserpina, executing a meta-theatrical experiment with the rich linguistic possibilities repetition provides, is a monodrama whose actual heroine is repetition.