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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... rhetoric ( mainly in the " second sophistic " of the third and fourth centuries A.D. ) was totally unrestricted : it referred , most broadly , to a verbal description of something , almost anything , in life or art.7 Whatever the object ...
... rhetoric . For him , at least at this stage of his argument , rhetoric - and history too , which Mazzoni seems to include within rhetoric as an " icastic " art - is as much a form of verbal imitation as poetry is , though a very ...
... rhetoric and in poetry . In this passage - in addition to the echo from Longinus that I have mentioned - Maz- zoni ... rhetoric and po- etry seems to have hardened , as does the exclusion , by implication , of the " icastic ' ' from ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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