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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... metaphysical equation . The desire to shift art's responsibility from objects to be re - pre- sented to a code to be interpreted helps turn all art into interpretable texts , even if - for a world confident of its metaphysical grounding ...
... metaphysical bad faith . There has been perhaps no more forceful attack against the claims for the power of the poet and the poet's shaped word to contain its object within it than in the essays of Paul de Man , both before and after ...
... metaphysical dream behind the timeless myth of " nature " and wary also of the post - romantic voluntarism , the hu- manistic aggrandizement , the hidden quest for private power , be- hind the modernist's will to totalization , to ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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