Beautiful Circuits

Beyond Ekphrasis: Visual Media and Modernist Narrative

“…Both of the representative modes that Miller identifies depend on such revision and repetition. As I have already suggested, in the perspectival mode, this revision emerges not only in relation to the practice of viewing in the round encouraged by the sculptural objects that populate the characters' ruminations, but also in relation to the double temporal 78 Ibid., 262. 79 Ohi, Queerness of Style, 37-38.…”

“…77 By sharp contrast, the perspectival mode creates episodes like the opening of Book 2, with Maggie's slow cogitation and the pagoda metaphor: this kind of representation appears largely in free indirect discourse. 78 It is worth noting that neither of these modes of representation is, as I have hinted, characterized by what we might consider to be an investment in the stock events of the genre: neither Maggie's marriage to Prince Amerigo nor her father's to Charlotte occurs onstage, and the existence of the Principino is acknowledged almost as an aside. Kevin Ohi summarizes this disinterest in his analysis of the novel's "reticence," which leaves these events "unnarrated," or "skipped over" and then "described, or sometimes only referred to, in retrospect."…”

“…95 Miller expresses the problem eloquently, writing that Fanny's use of the term "vicious circle" "expresses the way each one-on-one relation forms a separate 'case' incommensurate with all the others" so that "my fulfillment of my obligations to one person, in a given case, causes me to neglect and betray my obligations to all the others." 96 The partial view, in other words, helps to contribute to the circle and to enlarge it: the circle "leads those caught into it to betray one 94 Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1041 (emphasis original).…”

“…and ed. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), especially [77][78][79]. For more on this distinction, see Mitchell,Iconology,and Cheeke,Writing for Art,[5][6][22][23][24] were a landscape painting 38 -literature is forced to suspend the narrative function, so that passages of visual-verbal imbrication become static objects in their own right.…”

“…See Janice Hewlett Koelb, The Poetics of Description: Imagined Places in European Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1-5; Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter, especially 3-6; Cheeke, Writing for Art,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]51;and Heffernan,Museum of Words,[5][6]18,91, Leitch et al, introduction to The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3. 41 For Frank's recapitulation of this idea and further efforts to define this form, see Jeffrey R. Smitten, and Ann Daghistany, eds., Spatial Form in Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), and for more on the connection between the ideas of Lessing and Frank,see Mitchell,Iconology,[96][97] also gains "new prominence with the realist novel," as Starr notes, because "the proliferating objects of the modern world populate the nineteenth-century novel, and the details of nineteenth-century interiors or the clutter of the city form the backbone of realism." 42 )…”