Ekphrasis: Painting with Words (MA Seminar)
Mittwoch, 06.12.2023
This seminar attends to the creative uses of ekphrasis in poetry, short stories, novels, essays and memoirs. Poetically speaking, ekphrasis is “word-painting” (Murray Krieger 1992) or a “flirtation” between the arts (Virginia Woolf 1952), as it marks a medial and imaginative encounter between two different artforms, for example literature and painting. In a more theoretical sense, ekphrasis is an intermedial phenomenon (Werner Wolf 2005; Irina O. Rajewsky 2005 and 2010) that is most commonly understood as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (James A. W. Heffernan 1993). Going back to Homer’s evocation of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, ekphrasis can look back on a nearly 3’000-year-long tradition. What is more, even the invention of the Internet and digital media has not made ekphrasis obsolete and it can be found everywhere in contemporary (fictional and nonfictional) texts. If it is so easy to look up images on Google or to generate new ones with AI technologies, then why are authors still so keen to describe paintings, photographs, films, maps and other visual artifacts with words? This seminar wants to tease out a variety of responses to this simple question – “Why ekphrasis?” – by critically engaging with a range of literary texts. Our corpus is mostly comprised of texts written by English and American authors, but it also features one example by Korean author Han Kang. We will read evocative poems by John Keats, John Ashbery and Carol Ann Duffy; memorable short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. S. Byatt; experimental novels by Don DeLillo, Max Porter and Han Kang; and non-fictional essays and memoir-excerpts by Siri Hustvedt and Olivia Laing. In our discussion of ekphrastic evocations in literary texts, we will not only discuss visual, medial and aesthetic concerns, but also touch on categories of experiences relating to gender, class, race, and more. Ultimately, this seminar also serves to complicate a simplistic view of (ekphrastic) ‘description’ by showing how much narrative it actually generates, how much cultural work it performs, and how much playfulness, creativity and wonder it weaves into a text. Required Reading: Please note that the reading load for this class is heavy, so students should reserve enough time during the semester to complete all the readings. Many primary and secondary sources will be provided as scans on Ilias, but you must purchase the following works yourself: - A. S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories (1993) - Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007; transl. 2015) - Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010)
| Veranstaltungsart: | Vorlesung/Seminar |
|---|---|
| Dozierende(r): | Dr. Sofie Behluli |
| 06.12.2023: | 12:15 - 13:45 |
| Ort: |
Unitobler Lerchenweg 36 3012 Bern 1. UG, F-112 |
Sie können diese Veranstaltung in ihrer persönlichen Agenda speichern. In Ihrer persönlichen Veranstaltungsübersicht finden Sie alle relevanten Detailinformationen zu Ihren gespeicherten Veranstaltungen zum Ausdrucken.