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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... sequence of incidents is deceptive , since that sequence is frozen into the pattern fixed by the logical structure of probabilities . And the logical superimposes itself upon the chronological and changes it , subdues it to order by ...
... sequence and the spatiality of the form that freezes this sequence is resolved on the side of space . As the New Criticism turned the claims of the Coleridgean formulations into an ultimate critical method , the spa- tialization of ...
... sequence of words ( linguistic analogue to the moving sequence of existential moments ) and the formal cap- turing of this sequence in its consummate verbal form ( linguistic an- alogue to life's epiphanic moment , what I term elsewhere ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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