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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... thing- and , even more telling , should be a likeness and even an image of the thing - Socrates still concedes " that pictures are also imitations of things , but in another way ' ( p . 669 , my italics ) . Now , " likenesses " and ...
... things but also marvelous things . And for this reason when it can do so credibly , it falsifies human and nat- ural history and passes beyond them to impossible things . . . . So that , if two things equally credible were offered to ...
... things of this fading world in the face of death's eternity ( p . 275 ) . No wonder the painting that represented such things was called a vanitas , deceiving the senses as reminders of the deception pro- duced by the vain objects ...
Contents
Dramatic Representation | 30 |
Verbal Representation | 66 |
Natures Transcendence | 92 |
Copyright | |
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