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." |
From inside the book
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... emblem , in effect a verbal emblem . The visual emblem and the verbal emblem are complementary languages for seeking the repre- sentation of the unrepresentable . Ekphrasis is the poet's marriage of the two within the verbal art . As we ...
... emblem ( my " verbal emblem I ' ) and what I will here treat as " verbal emblem II . " My purpose in this chapter is to explore the development of this emblem and with it the ulti- mate modernist return to a newly dynamic spatiality ...
... emblem , Renais- sance or modern . The emblem is the ultimate ekphrasis , as natural- sign mimesis - even of works of the visual arts - was not . In the ek- phrastic emblem what is to be imitated is not just an object external to the ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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