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
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... sense " illusion " and in what sense " delusion " ? He sees illusion as a wilful version of delusion , a deception that is aware of itself even as it indulges itself . The spectator sees the duplicity in the play but is complicitous in ...
... sense of enargeia , already strained by this intro- duction of the " image " of the Furies , is utterly transformed in the comments that follow a number of additional examples Longinus later quotes , even though it still seems to be ...
... sense that something is being described that ought to be visually apprehensible . It is true that even an actual picture , as a representational " image , " is only an illusion of the ob- ject behind it , but the pictorialist - or ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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