Ekphrasis in the Digital Age

Abstract

This introduction briefly surveys the current expansion of ekphrasis in terms of genres, visual objects, modes of writing, and cues for reader response. Drawing on suggestions from the subsequent individual essays that provide categories for organizing the great variety of ekphrases, such as pictured and picture-less, mimetic and transformed, notional and actual, abbreviated and described, printed and screen, canonical artwork and non-art image, narrative and poetic ekphrasis, the introduction further discusses ekphrastic theories with a specific focus on their relevance to its practices and cultural functions in the present media ecology. Despite its increasing frequency in recent years, theoretical conceptualizations have largely remained committed to traditional paradigms, such as competition ("paragone") and representation (Heffernan 1993: 1). What appears to be wanting is a revival of rhetorical and performative understandings of ekphrasis that can augment theoretical conceptualizations and bring them into line with the participatory and hybrid practices of ekphrasis today. Increasingly, what used to be a central aim of ekphrasisthe description of an artworkhas been replaced by modes of rewriting the artwork and in the process questioning accepted meanings, values, and beliefs, not just relating to the particular artwork in question but referencing the ways of seeing and the scopic regimes of the culture at large. Since these changes in writing and reading practices tend toward increasing the participation of the reader, a more meta-representational and rhetorical conceptualization of ekphrasis is desirable. From a functional perspective, I argue that the traditional purpose of ekphrasis to interrogate ways of seeing has acquired new urgency in today's media landscape.

O sublime ecfrástico dos vídeos musicais: um travelling literário a partir da letra

“…Antes de mais, importa clarificar que se parte de uma tentativa contracorrente ao chamado pictorial turn que W. J. T. Mitchell identifica quanto às humanidades algures na década de 1980. Se o "[l]ogocentrismo teórico já não é adequado ao deslocamento da cultura mediática contemporânea da posição privilegiada do texto" (BROSCH, 2018(BROSCH, , p. 2033 43 , a lógica de um método literarizante seria a de o testar num formato, os videoclipes, em que ele jamais se impôs -um formato cuja consolidação pela MTV é temporalmente sincrónica com a sua própria falência do pedestal. Ora, um dos primeiros obstáculos de um esquisso metodológico coloca-se pelo facto de a canção já ser multimedial, significar timbres, inflexões vocais acompanhadas de outros elementos musicais face à letra.…”

Animating the Kress Collection: Toward a Model of Shared Curatorial Authority and Engagement with Old Master Works

“…The video serves to restore the painting to its original comic context. These animated forms of interpretation can be described as cultivating a sense of "digital ekphrasis" (Brosch, 2018) among the youth animators as well as designing a production and evaluation process that fully incorporated their input. Often understood in 19th century terms as the poetic and primarily visual description of a work of art, ekphrasis, according to Renate Brosch, is really about "describing the perception of an image" (Brosch, 2018, p. 239).…”

The Phototextual Emergence of Hysteria: From the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière to J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man

“…The ubiquity of images in the digital space creates what Renate Brosch describes as 'an enlarged cultural memory of images' . 66 The continual return of the Iconographie's depiction of hysteria is perhaps an indication that it never actually disappeared. Even though the diagnosis is no longer used, many remain receptive to hysteria's stereotype because, as Hustvedt points out, modern medicine 'continues to perpetuate the idea that the female body is far more vulnerable than its male counterpart.…”