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 75
... seen by the mind's eye rather than phenomenal objects seen by the body's eye , then the superior- ity of interpretable- and hence intelligible - symbols , visual or ver- bal , over the immediately representational arts , is assured ...
... seen as part of a transaction with the viewer - hearer from which the aesthetic ( as non - real , as fictional ) cannot be excluded . We have seen that this turns out to be the case even if the work of art is a would - be natural sign ...
... seen as reflecting a similar uncertainty . Second ( and here Shelley , at least in one passage , leads the way ) , the increasing awareness of the sensuous character of the verbal me- dium leads to the attempt to return poetry to the ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown