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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... temporal and the verbal — the ascendancy and the fall of one art after another as the model art for its rivals to ape . It should be conceded that these two oppositions , space versus time and picture versus word , do not necessarily ...
... temporal flow . Is it any wonder that I insist on words like " elusive " and " taunting " to characterize ekphrasis as a subject for theoretical placement ? Whence this sense of inadequacy , of irresolution , of incomplete- ness , this ...
... temporal art of literature . His call for the " juxtaposition of word groups " in modernist writing may begin only as a metaphor for the spatial ( because , as Lessing has told us , a text is in fact not a canvas and can only be read ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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