Chapter 2 Ekphrasis and W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory
2.1 Ekphrasis: A Cross-media Terminology
From an old Greek rhetoric term to a subject of contemporary comparative and interdisciplinary arts, the meaning of ekphrasis has gone through a long-term historical development. Etymologically “composed from the Greek words ek (out) and phrazein (tell, declare, pronounce)”, ekphrasis at first was used to mean “tell in full” (Heffernan, 1993)191. In ancient times, ekphrasis was a basic rhetoric exercise for students to learn public speaking in the Progymnasmata②, referring to using vivid language to describe things whose subjects can be people, animals, tools, places, actions, and so on. The most significant feature and also the heart of ekphrasis was “enargeia”, which means vividness, making the audience enter into an immersive environment. The orator made full use of the imagination in the mind, turned the visualization into language and gave the audience a scene in their mind. The effect of the evocation of a scene stems from the orator’s delicate choice of details that corresponds with the audience’s experience and knowledge, arousing the mental images stored in memory (Webb, 1999)14. Ekphrasis often recurred as a keyword in the comments of Homer’s Epics, the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad (book 18, line 478-608) being a perfect example. Moreover, many ancient Greek writers, like Lucian, Apuleius, Callistratos, Philostratos the Elder and the Younger, also wielded ekphrasis to poetically describe works of art and their art production became the turning point of the close connection between ekphrasis and works of art. Since then, the subject of ekphrasis has been limited to works of art such as paintings and sculptures and ekphrasis became a unique literature genre. The tradition of ekphrasis continued to develop in the Byzantine period and Renaissance, but then fell silent.
2.2 W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory
W. J. T. Mitchell, is the professor of Chicago University who specializes in visual culture studies, art history and cultural criticism. His book Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation was published in 1995 and it discussed what pictures are, the relationship between pictures and languages, and the importance of these problems. It also focused on “the interactions of visual and verbal representation in a variety of media, principally literature and the visual arts” (Michell, 1995)5, which is very consistent with the content of this study, so this thesis uses several of the ideas proposed by Mitchell to develop the strategy of analyzing poetry.
Mitchell proposed an argument that “all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous” (1995)5. As a kind of mixed media and representation, ekphrasis is the mixture of poetry and visual arts and it must be different from the original visual art. The difference, or heterogeneity, is the core of rewriting of visual arts by poetry. Mitchell (1987)103 thought that “[a] poem is not literally temporal and figuratively spatial: it is literally a spatial-temporal construction.” And he put forward a concept of “imagetext”, meaning “composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text” (1995)89. In ekphrastic poetry, the poetic language acts on readers the way words figuratively conjure up images, pictures, space and vision, so ekphrastic poetry is a kind of “imagetext”. It reflects the homogeneity between word and image, which is the core of transformation of visual arts by poetry. Therefore, the het
