EKPRHASIS
Defined

Websters Unabridged 2nd Ed.:

 

 

O.E.D.:

Hollander:

"'Ecphrasis' (frequently spelled in the directly transliterated form, ekphrasis) has been until the last decade or so a technical term used by classicists and historians of art to mean a verbal description of a work of art, of a scene as rendered in a work of art, or even of a fictional scene the description of which unacknowledgedly derives from descriptions of scenes. In recent literary theory, considerations of ecphrasis have concerned the ways in which space and time are involved in the various mutual figurations of actuality, text, and picture. Classicists are frequently concerned with the relation between the ecphrasis of a picture and the question of scene descriptions in fiction generally; of central interest there is the relation between the vividness or liveliness (in Greek, enargeia) of a painting, say, and the rhetorical vividness of the writing."(5)

 

Krieger:

Krieger's book chapters are faced with letter-emblems, "...those shields, are meant to call attention to what I hope may become evident by the end (of the book): that I have tried to shape my book as an imitation of that word ekphrasis (an ekphrasis of ekphrasis) and thus the circle designating the Homeric shield that is its most celebrated representation." (xiv)

"From the first, then, to look into ekphrasis is to look into the illusionary representation of the unrepresentable, even while that representation is allowed to masquerade as a natural sign, as if it could be an adequate substitute for its object. And this leads me from my title to my subtitle." (xv)

"What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant's vision, but a mirage because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem's words." (xvi-xvii)

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