Ekphrasis has been a focus of academic study for two decades now, chiefly
it seems as a result of W.J.T. Mitchell's work in Chicago. His concept of
"ekphrastic fear" is interesting. I interviewed him for the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation in 1986, where he discussed the appearance of the
trope in Critical Enquiry (a magazine he edited). He has since spoken and
written about it at conferences and in various books, e.g.:
W. J. T. Mitchell, "Ekphrasis and the Other." Picture Theory. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1994.
Quote:
"POSITIONING HIS descriptions of ekphrastic experience among a scale of
three points ("ekphrastic indifference, ekphrastic hope and ekphrastic
fear"), Mitchell identifies the concept with a fundamental tendency in all
linguistic expression through imagination and metaphor. The stated goal of
ekphrastic hope might be called "the overcoming of others." According to
Mitchell, "ekphrastic fear is the moment of resistance or counterdesire
that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and visual
representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of
ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually." Mitchell leads readers
through specific discussions of Williams, Keats, Stevens and especially
Shelley, reading the manuscript poem "On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in
the Florentine Gallery" into his argument. Of this poem he says, "If
ekphrasis, as a verbal representation of a visual representation, is an
attempt to repress or 'take dominion' over language's graphic Other, then
Shelley's Medusa is the return of that repressed image, teasing us out of
thought with a vengeance." In discussing this poem Mitchell argues that
gender is one among many figures of difference that energize the dialectic
of the imagetext. Mitchell (like Murray Krieger) suggest that ekphrastic
digressions aim to be all of literature in miniature. Mitchell thinks that
ekphrasis is "one of the keys to difference within language (both ordinary
and literary) and that it focuses the interarticulation of perceptual,
semiotic, and social contradictions within verbal representation." (Jean
Jacobson.)
____________________
Then there's this:
University of Sussex GRC Humanities/CulCom The Visual Culture of
Romanticism Spring 2002
Dr. Sophie Thomas, Essex House 224, (01273) 606755, ext. 2095. Email:
[log in to unmask], or [log in to unmask]
Office Hours: Wednesday, 11:30-12:30, or by arrangement Seminar time and
place: Mondays, 11:30-1:20, D531
General Description This course explores the "visual culture" of
Romanticism through concepts of the visual, the visible, and the visionary.
The course involves three general areas of concern: first, consideration of
the predominant visual media of the period; second, the relationship of
nature to culture when nature has been, with the aestheticization of the
physical world, fundamentally "visualized"; and finally, the metaphoric
extensions that the visual gives rise to in Romantic aesthetic discourse,
such as the relation of vision to the visionary, of the visible to the
invisible, and of veiling to revelation. The material of the course is
primarily literary, but there is scope for projects of an art historical
natureWeek 7 (Feb. 18): Romantic Ekphrasis Many texts of the period take
visual artifacts, and artworks, as their subjects. This week, we will
examine the relationship of art to literary representation, the visual to
the verbal, in a selection of such works. Primary reading: Wordsworth,
"Elegaic Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle" Keats, "Ode on a
Grecian Urn" Shelley, "On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine
Gallery" (see the Romantic Circles hypertext link for material on "Medusa")
Carol Jacobs, "On Looking at Shelley's Medusa" Yale French Studies 69
(1985), pp. 163-79.
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Page 4
4 James Heffernan, Museum of Words (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1993). Supplementary reading: James Heffernan, "Ekphrasis
and Representation" in NLH 22 (1991), pp. 297-316. John Hollander, "The
Poetics of Ekphrasis" in Word & Image 4 (1988), pp. 209-19. Ian Jack, Keats
and the Mirror of Art (Oxford, 1967). Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The
Illusion of the Natural Sign (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). W.J.T.
Mitchell, "Ekphrasis and the Other" in his Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal
and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1994). Neville Rogers, "Shelley and the Visual Arts," Keats-Shelley
Memorial Bulletin 12 (1961).
-- John Tranter, editor, Jacket magazine
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