by Jon Lackman | 13 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the Summer 2006 Critical Inquiry, Jas’ Elsner writes, in the conclusion to his article on Riegl: “There is much value in treating art-historical discourse in general as ekphrasis. This is to say, it is rhetorical, with the aim of persuading an audience of a point or an argument; it is directed not towards some final positivist truth but towards a goal situated (consciously or unconsciously) in the art historian’s desire, whether ideological, psychological, even just tendentious … The rhetorical nature of ekphrasis might also be said to effect a parallelism between the discourses we use about art and those of art itself, since, in whatever contexts images are employed, they too are rhetorical.”
In the October/December 2006 Word & Image, poet/poetry scholar Shahar Bram writes: “In his preface to a special issue dedicated to ekphrasis, Mario Klarer observes that this term has gained wider currency in recent years due to the increasing numbers of writings that ‘focus on ekphrasis as a phenomenon in interart studies.’ … [W.J.T.] Mitchell tells us: ‘The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs’ … For Mitchell, [James] Haffernan, and other prominent contemporary writers, then, ekphrasis reprsents this story and this history. But it really a history of a struggle? … The use of the rhetoric of struggle … turns out to be a traditional device: it is used throughout the tradition of ‘ut pictura poesis’ to conceal an immanent analogy between the two modes of representation.”
