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." |
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... relation - positive or negative - to the in- junction ut pictura poesis , broadly interpreted . I will be tracing the fortunes of the favored metaphors of critical and theoretical dis- course about literature , metaphors shaped for many ...
... relation among the arts proposed by the natural - sign aesthetic has been in- verted : with Shelley as with Longinus ... relation that they have toward " each other . " Still , Shelley's primary and usual allegiance is to an imme- diate ...
... relation . 31 Yet the other side of this inverse relation is also pressed from time to time , with poetry , as an art in need of exploiting its medium , able to achieve levels of expression closed to arts of unmediated representa- tion ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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