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 76
... painting's . Poetry is indeed freed from the obligation to provide " descrip- tions " ( in Addison's sense of the word ) that yield pictures for the painter , but it yields its own sort of pictures nonetheless - in effect moving ...
... painting as its model , may seem to overlook the reverse ten- dency , which was also common in this period , to make painting like literature . For all my insistence on poetry as a " speaking picture , ' ' I should give due emphasis to ...
... painting in which the objects stat- ically disposed to be imitated are represented as being so delicately transient ( thin , transparent , even " partly consumed ' ' ) that they are seen as only momentarily present : " They seem only ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown