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James A W Heffernan Ekphrasis and Representation PDF
James A W Heffernan Ekphrasis and Representation PDF
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Ekphrasis and Representation*
James A. W. Heffernan
*My thanks to Stuart Curran and George T. Wright,who made helpful suggestions
on an earlier version of this essay, and also to Michael Riffaterre,who invited me
to deliver the original version of it at the Columbia colloquium mentioned in the
opening paragraph.
New Literary
History,1991, 22: 297-316
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298 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 299
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300 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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310 NEWLITERARY
HISTORY
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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 311
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312 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
NOTES
1 In what is probably the earliest definitionof the term, which was extensively
used by Greek rhetoriciansof the firstfive centuries A.D., it is called simply "a
descriptive account bringing what is illustrated vividlybefore one's sight." (Shadi
Bartsch,DecodingtheAncientNovel: The Readerand theRole of Description in Heliodorus
and AchillesTatius[Princeton,1989] p. 9.) In the Greek rhetoricalhandbooks, statues
and paintingswere treated amongthe objects suitable for ekphrasticdescription,but
only after the fifthcentury did ekphrasiscome to denote the description of visual
art exclusively(Bartsch, p. 10).
2 See Leo Spitzer, "The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' or Content vs. Metagrammar,"
Contemporary 7 (1955), 208, and Murray Krieger, "Ekphrasisand the Still
Literature,
Movement of Poetry; or, LaokodnRevisited,"in The Poet as Critic,ed. Frederick P.
W. McDowell (Evanston, Ill., 1967), p. 8; hereaftercited in text.
3 Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 116-52;
WilliamFreedman, "Postponementand Perspectivesin Shelley's'Ozymandias,'" Studies
in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 63-73.
4 See Wordand Image, 2 (1986).
5 Murray Krieger calls ekphrasis "a classic genre" ("Ekphrasis,"5), but this would
put it on a par withepic and tragedy.Since no formalor syntacticfeaturesdistinguish
the literaryrepresentationof visual art from other kinds of literature,and since it
can appear withinany recognizedgenre fromepic to lyric,it maybe more appropriately
termed a mode, like pastoral or elegy. But while those two can be largely defined
by their subject matter,the subject matter of ekphrasis requires us to define it in
terms of representation.
6 See n. 2 above. In "Words on Pictures: Ekphrasis,"Artand Antiques(March 1984),
80-91, John Hollander surveysexamples of ekphrasis from Homer to our own time
and makes some suggestivecommentson them,but he does not attemptto construct
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