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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... later classicism , looking for a device that would break into and halt the temporal flow of discourse by forcing us to pause over an extended verbal picture , develops the notion of ekphrasis ( as an elaborate description of any visible ...
... later as an English translation of the German Einfühlung ) . 10 Through sympathy , Burke tells us , " we enter into the concerns of others ; . . . are moved as they are moved , and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators ...
... later post - Kantians as a second coming of Aristotle that shows the form- making doctrine of the Poetics to be relevant to romantic organicism . The imposition worked by the Aristotelian poet upon his materials from a position outside ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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