Ekphrasis and Perspectival Structure

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

My subject is the complex communication which results from interart transfer between literature and painting. Specifically, it focuses on ekphrasis (image-to-word transfer) as the meeting ground of two discrete, if not discordant, communicative systems. Using the narratological concept of perspective (or point of view), I examine first the structure of communication in each of the two media by itself. A graphic artwork links the painter as sender and the spectator as addressee. Verbal fiction complicates matters in entailing four participants: the implied author, the overt narrator, the fictional characters, and the reader. Furthermore, each of these may occupy or express a distinct perspective along numerous axes: style, knowledge, time and space, value frame, cultural background. Hence the difficulties of translating a communicative act from one medium into the other: e.g., rendering a narrative dialogue in graphic form or verbalizing the posture and gaze of painted figures in an ekphrastic poem. Either way, such translation is theorized here as interart quotation, or re-presentation, whereby one, originally autonomous artwork (e.g., a painting) becomes an inset framed within another artwork in another medium (e.g., the ekphrastic text): part of a new, alien whole, with its own structure of transmission, inter alia. Moreover, given that every whole controls its parts, the quoting literary frame can select, arrange, reperspectivize the visual inset according to its own purposes. Ekphrasis thus lends itself to many forms and effects, just as it raises many theoretical issues. The second part of the article illustrates these forms and effects - not least their wider cultural implications - from an ekphrastic passage in John Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
PublisherBrill Rodopi
Pages189-202
Number of pages14
DOIs
StatePublished - 2002

Publication series

NameInternationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
Volume62
ISSN (Print)0929-6999

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