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Memorability, shareability, and repeatability are interrelated characteristics often ascribed to lyric poetry in current theory, sometimes with an emphasis on the transnational potential of its circulation. This article approaches this question of shareability not in terms of diction or form, as is usually the case, but of gesture. Drawing on Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, gesture is defined as both historically situated and transferable to different contexts, but whether or not to re-enact a particular gesture in one's own context is a political decision. After examining how a sonnet by Andrea Zanzotto addresses the lyric gesture of exhortation offered by a Petrarch sonnet, the article goes on to explore the potentiality opened up for the formation of gestural communities by the suspension of action in the lyric.
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