Abstract
Ekphrastic writing attempts to bring a visual work “to life” through the vividness of the writer’s description. More generally, ekphrasis is an invitation to read one representational medium in terms of another. This chapter focuses on ekphrasis as a reading strategy that magnifies, refracts, and opens up a work to significations unavailable or otherwise invisible. I begin with a brief overview of definitions of ekphrasis and the differential relationships they imply and then turn to activities of reading evident in well-known ekphrastic moments in Moby-Dick (1851) and Daisy Miller (1878). In both examples, the prose’s progress appears momentarily “stilled” by the presence of a painting, the contemplation of which “releases” additional narratives. Ekphrasis can likewise reflect more ideologically constructed differences, as I demonstrate in my analysis of Gary Wolf’s hard-boiled detective novel, Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981). The novel’s characters are divided into two dominant groups—humans and ’toons—and the latter communicate via word balloons that the narrator, private detective Eddie Valiant, then describes for readers with such detail as to bring them before their minds’ eye in the manner of ekphrasis. Divisions between verbal and visual, between “us” and “them,” maintain the story’s divisions between humans and ’toons. In this chapter, I posit that, in opening up works to additional informing texts, ekphrasis expands readers’ experiences of a work and expands a given work’s larger network of reference.
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Notes
- 1.
In a footnote to “The Deadly Poppy Field” chapter, Michael Patrick Hearn notes: “It is surprising that someone as fond of flowers as Baum was should introduce so many hostile plants into the Oz books,” The Annotated Wizard of Oz (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000) p. 141, n. 6. Carnivorous and menacing flowers and vegetation appear fairly often throughout the Oz series. For example, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1960) includes fighting trees and the poppy fields (which may or may not be consciously menacing), and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) includes the Mangaboos, a race of vegetable people, who send unwanted outsiders into “The Garden of the Clinging Vines” to die.
- 2.
Granted, the Scarecrow is disemboweled at several points in the Oz narrative trajectory—most notably by the Wicked Witch of the West’s flying monkeys in several versions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—but he also disembowels himself to protect his friends from the swarm of bees.
- 3.
Baum’s original manuscript included a chapter, “The Garden of Meats,” which focused on a race of vegetable people, who farmed humans for food. Baum’s publishers found the chapter too troubling and suggested that he omit it, which he did. Though, as the poem indicates, the chapter is no longer extant, a few of John R. Neill’s illustrations remain. These, combined with Baum’s correspondence and publisher’s notes, provide a rough sketch of what the chapter might have entailed.
- 4.
This chapter focuses primarily on ekphrasis as it manifests in words based on visual art. Several studies have addressed ekphrasis in other media, among them Siglind Bruhn’s Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2000) and Sonic Transformations of Literary Texts: From Program Music to Musical Ekphrasis (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2008), and Linda Sager Eidt’s Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
- 5.
Rajewsky does not address ekphrasis specifically in her discussion of intermedial references; she focuses, rather, on dance theater and photorealistic paintings. Important to the distinction between intermedial referencing is that “it is not two or more different forms of medial articulation that are present in their own specific materiality”—the work is not a hybrid combining photograph and painting, but, rather the painting takes on the attributes of the photograph (2010, 58).
- 6.
Laura Sager Eidt provides a succinct overview the history of criticism that casts the so-called tension between words and images in social and ideological terms (2008, 14–16).
- 7.
A number of writers have addressed this moment, among them Howard P. Vincent, “Ishmael, Writer and Critic,” in Themes and Directions in American Literature, ed. Ray B. Brown and Donald Pizer (Lafeyette: Purdue University Press, 1969), and Moore 1982.
- 8.
For Clüver and others writing on ekphrasis, enargeia distinguishes ekphrasis from ordinary description; for others, though, like Yacobi, writing need not demonstrate enargeia to be ekphrastic (Clüver 1998, 37–9, 42).
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Newell, K. (2017). “All Text is Lost”: Ekphrastic Reading. In: Expanding Adaptation Networks. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56712-3_6
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