Overview

Originally 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.""

Full Product Details

Author:   Murray Krieger
Publisher:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9781421431208

ISBN 10:   1421431203
Pages:   322
Publication Date:   26 January 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Foreword: Of Shields Chapter 1. Picture and Word, Space and Time: The Exhilaration – and Exasperation – of Ekphrasis as a Subject Chapter 2. Representation as Illusion: Dramatic Representation and the Natural-Sign Aesthetic Chapter 3. Representation as Enargeia I: Verbal Representation and the Natural-Sign Aesthetic Chapter 4. Representation as Enargeia II: Nature's Transcendence of the Natural Sign Chapter 5. The Verbal Emblem I: The Renaissance Chapter 6. Language as Aesthetic Material Chapter 7. The Verbal Emblem II: From Romanticism to Modernism Chapter 8. A Postmodern Retrospect: Semiotic Desire, Repression in the Name of Nature, and a Space for the Ekphrastic Appendix: Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited (1967) Index

Reviews

Since he published his wonderful 1967 essay on ekphrasis, or the literary depiction of visual art, Krieger has been wrestling with the larger implications of the genre for a theory of how it manifests itself. In this thoughtful and thought-provoking book, he forcefully grapples with the ancient paradox that words in time can seem to create images in space. * Virginia Quarterly Review *

Since he published his wonderful 1967 essay on ekphrasis, or the literary depiction of visual art, Krieger has been wrestling with the larger implications of the genre for a theory of how it manifests itself. In this thoughtful and thought-provoking book, he forcefully grapples with the ancient paradox that words in time can seem to create images in space.

Author Information

Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of A Reopening of Closure: Organicism against Itself and Words about Words about Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Text, the latter available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

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