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
Results 1-3 of 87
... natural - sign function of painting with the hand- icap of not being able literally to claim a " natural " status for its signs . We have seen that this view could also claim support from Pla- to , although not from the special and ...
The Illusion of the Natural Sign Murray Krieger, Joan Krieger. complete the move of the verbal arts toward the natural sign . I originally introduced Lessing by promising that he would extend and complete the framework of the natural - sign ...
... natural sign in drama and , consequently , from domination by the natural sign in sociopolitical institutions . An alternative to illusionistic drama becomes , for him and his agenda , a political necessity.12 But I have been arguing ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown