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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... space and audience time and space , between , that is , the passage of time represented onstage and the amount of elapsed time in the theater , as well as between the one place to be represented onstage and the singleness of the framed ...
... space in the arts Lessing treated as spatial no less than space invades time in the arts Lessing treated as temporal . Rosalie Colie extends this notion in " Still Life : Paradoxes of Be- ing , " a central chapter in her Paradoxia ...
... space . Very likely it was just this self - conscious necessity that created the tradition of ut pictura poesis from Simonides to Winckelmann , the tradition that drove Lessing to the classical good sense of his Lao- koön and its ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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