Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural SignOriginally published in 1992. What, in apparently pictorial poetry, do words represent? Conversely, how can words in a poem be picturable? Murray Krieger develops a systematic theoretical statement out of answers to such questions. Ekphrasis is his account of the continuing debates over meaning in language from Plato to the present. Krieger sees the modernist position as the logical outcome of these debates but argues that more recent theories radically question the political and aesthetic assumptions of the modernists and the two-thousand-year tradition they claim to culminate. Krieger focuses on ekphrasis—the literary representation of visual art, real or imaginary—a form at least as old as its most famous example, the shield of Achilles verbally invented in the Iliad. He argues that the "ekphrastic principle" has remained enduringly problematic in that it reflects the resistant paradoxes of representation in words. As he examines the conflict between the spatial and temporal, between vision-centered and word-centered metaphors, Krieger reveals how literary theory has been shaped by the attempts and the deceptive failures of language to do the job of the "natural sign." |
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... becomes a technical generic term , seems to become restricted in order to conform to those examples , those diverting descriptive interludes , that commentary habitually selected as the great ekphra- ses . " And the connection of ...
... becomes one with- the object , transforming it into himself as subject.11 As Burke ad- dresses Du Bos , he puts the opposition , and his preference , bluntly : " I know several who admire and love painting , and yet who regard the ...
... becomes an allegory of the deceptions of the material world represented by the material things it is imitating . Colie is thus suggesting a daring - even reckless - universalizing and thematizing of this claim . All artists , having become ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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