scholarly journals Michael Field

Le Simplegadi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (20) ◽  
pp. 80-91
Author(s):  
Carla Tempestoso

The allure of the connection between literature, journey and the sister arts interlaces with the endeavours of human beings and with the act of writing about it, of transforming it into a story and sharing it with others (Pantini 1999). The poems included in the collection Sight and Song (1892) by Michael Field, male pseudonym of authoresses Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper, not only manage to celebrate the affiliation between literature and the figurative arts, but they also become a verbal representation of the visual art, namely of that ékphrasis deemed to be as an exchange between visual and textual cultures. In this analysis, the revolutionary ekphrastic inspiration of the two authoresses will validate the possibility of observing art and reality in a different way and translating it into poetic texts so as to allow the rise of that political capability of subverting Victorian identities and social hierarchies.

This chapter defines ekphrasis concisely as ‘the verbal representation of real or fictive configurations composed in a non-kinetic visual medium’. It rejects narrower definitions that exclude texts on non-representational visual configurations, including architecture, or restrict the discourse to literary texts representing works of art. But with its emphasis on the text the concise definition unduly reinforces the consideration of ekphrasis as a form of ‘intermedial transposition’ in contemporary discourse on intermedial relations. An ekphrastic text should be primarily approached as the record of a viewer’s interpretive encounter with a non-kinetic visual configuration, which may not actually contain anything that has been ‘transposed’ from the image. This viewer may be the persona of a poem, a figure in a prose narrative, or an art critic. It is the reader’s task to construct these viewers in the interpretation of any ekphrastic text. But the role of the reader has not received much attention. This includes the question of the immediate mental reception of ekphrastic texts. The critical construct of ‘iconotexts’, suggesting that such verbal texts spontaneously trigger a mental visual image for the informed reader, is problematic, and even in a more general sense the term may be of limited critical use.


Author(s):  
Hélène Ibata

This first chapter emphasises what Burke’s Enquiry owes to the existing discourse on the sublime (to Longinus and Addison in particular), in order to highlight its innovations, more specifically its aesthetically stimulating irrationalism and sensualism. It then focuses on Burke’s unique distinction between visual and verbal representation, his rejection of their common mimetic basis, and his argument that only the non-mimetic, suggestive medium of the verbal arts, language, may impart the sublime. At a time when parallels between the arts prevailed, this was an isolated point of view, which introduced a new paragone situation, and a challenge to visual artists. The end of the chapter examines a number of competing theories of the sublime that were compatible with painting, which makes it possible to enhance the specificity of the Enquiry and the paradox of its appeal to visual artists.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Alastair Fowler

This introductory chapter provides a brief background of three schools of literary criticism: New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction. These three schools exposed serious concerns, emphasizing neglected aspects of literature. The chapters in this book focus on genre, realism, and relations with visual art. Concepts of genre figure in any sound literary theory. Meanwhile, chapters on realism demonstrate how the development of representation, far from being one of steadily improving verisimilitude, has gone through several distinct sorts of realism. They distinguish medieval and Renaissance realisms from the realism of pre-modern novels. Finally, chapters on visual art consider how conventions of visual art offer essential parallels with those of literature. The ‘sister arts’ display many family resemblances—obviously so in imagery, less obviously in their strategies of realism. The essays also look at emblems and emblematic poems.


2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
laura heon

over the past century, an art form has emerged between the realms of visual art and music. created by composers and sculptors, ‘sound art’ challenges fundamental divisions between these two sister arts and may be found in museums, festivals or public sites. works of sound art play on the fringes of our often-unconscious aural experience of a world dominated by the visual. this work addresses our ears in surprising ways: it is not strictly music, or noise, or speech, or any sound found in nature, but often includes, combines and transforms elements of all of these. sound art sculpts sound in space and time, reacts to environments and reshapes them, and frames ambient ‘found sound’, altering our concepts of space, time, music and noise.


Author(s):  
Vladimir I. Karasik ◽  
Maria S. Milovanova

The paper deals with a linguistic and cultural conceptualization of reality. A symbolic dimension of a concept is analyzed on the basis of its notional, perceptive and axiological features. The concept BRIDGE has been described in its verbal representation in the Russian and English linguistic cultures. The material of the study includes definitions from dictionaries and encyclopedias, textual samples from the Russian and English national corpuses, proverbs and aphorisms and poetic texts. Metaphorically, a bridge is understood as an opportunity to move on along the road via some natural obstacles, usually rivers. Symbolically, the following ideas come to the fore when applied to the concept BRIDGE: crossing an obstacle, raising up, possibility or impossibility of coming back, safety or insecurity. The novelty of the research consists in the description of these vectors of conceptualization of a BRIDGE as a cluster of the symbolic meanings of building or destroying a bridge and going up or falling down from it.


Author(s):  
Sophie Thomas

This chapter examines the numerous places where words and images combine or collide in Romantic literature and culture, such as in book production and illustration; in poetry, painting, and theories of the two as ‘sister arts’; in ekphrastic literary texts; in prints and annuals; and in exhibitions and galleries. The chapter explores the historical and artistic context for a range of dynamic experiments that raise conceptual questions about visual and verbal representation, and the nature of the connections between them. At the same time, it unsettles the apparently dual nature of a relationship that in fact often includes objects and places, or extends into other media and forms. Writers and artists discussed include Blake, Wordsworth, Beaumont, Gillray, and Turner.


Ekphrasis – the verbal representation of visual art – has traditionally been regarded as a form of paragone or competition between different forms of representation. The Introduction advocates a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between word and image. It outlines the ways in which the paragone has dominated critical conceptions of intermedial relationships. Ekphrastic works of various periods and styles have been read through the paradigm of the paragone that was established in the Renaissance; and yet this was not the only model available during that period. It is argued that the agonistic model was the primary means of conceptualising ekphrasis during the first ‘ekphrastic turn’ of the 1990s, and that this model has continued to be influential into the twenty-first century. However recent critics and theorists working across various disciplines and periods have started to interrogate this influential paradigm.


Iacopone da Todi (b. 1230/36–d. 1304/06) is the most important writer of laude between the 13th and 14th centuries and is considered an unavoidable model for laude collections of subsequent centuries. The genre of laude, which are religious poetic texts in the vernacular, came to life in the 13th century under the impulse of penitential movements, within the mendicant groups and the newly constituted religious confraternities. It prospered in the context of paraliturgical celebrations in the vernacular, thanks to which the faithful lay people reinterpreted the official Latin liturgy in forms that were more suited to them. After a worldly youth—according to ancient biographical accounts—Iacopone joined the Franciscan Order and participated in the bitter disputes between Spiritual and Moderate Franciscans, siding with the Spirituals and defending a more rigorous interpretation of Francis’s Rule. His inflexible stand also originated his conflict against Pope Boniface VIII, which caused his incarceration between 1298 and 1303, after the fall of the fortress of Palestrina where Iacopone was involved in a resistance together with other papal opponents. He wrote a collection of approximately one hundred spiritual laude and two Latin texts, the Tractatus utilissimus and Verba. The attribution to him of the Latin sequence “Stabat Mater” is debated. Some of Iacopone’s laude are catechetical texts, moral exhortations, political and ideological diatribes (for example, against incoherent Franciscan friars and clerics), ascetic meditations, and mystical confessions. At the heart of Iacopone’s mysticism is the concept of esmesuranza (extra-measure), or the infinite love human beings are called to give back for God’s infinite love on the cross. That is how human beings can transcend themselves, transforming into the image of God. Iacopone’s language includes the most disparate expressive registers, oscillating between a jongleur’s vigorous realism and passionate lyrical outbursts. His relationship to his contemporary Dante Alighieri is still much debated by literary criticism, although no philologically credible proof exists that the two ever knew of each other’s work or existence. Dante’s passion for Franciscan themes, such as poverty as an essential component of church purification and the mystical union with divinity, creates interesting parallels in the works of the two poets. Over the years, criticism has acknowledged the importance of the Iacoponian poetic model for the construction, over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, of a lyrical grammar of divine love, which was shared by the European tradition of ecstatic confessions.


This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. In the past twenty five years numerous books and articles have appeared covering different aspects of ekphrasis, with scholars arguing that it is a fundamental means by which literary artists have explored the nature of aesthetic experience. However many critics continue to rely upon the traditional conception of ekphrasis as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to complicate this critical paradigm, and proposes a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between visual and textual cultures. This critical and theoretical shift demands a new form of ekphrastic poetics, which is less concerned with representational and institutional struggles, and more concerned with ideas of ethics, affect, and intersubjectivity. The book brings together leading scholars working in the fields of literary studies, art history, modern languages, and comparative literature, and offers a fresh exploration of ekphrastic texts from the Renaissance to the present day. The chapters in the book are critically and methodologically wide-ranging; yet they share an interest in challenging the paragonal model of ekphrasis that has been prevalent since the early 1990s, and establishing a new set of theoretical frameworks for exploring the ekphrastic encounter.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Dagmar

The study The Shakespeares of Jozef Ciller tackles the Renaissance manner of the expression in the topic defined by its title using historical and comparative analyses. The author of the study analysed the way the scenographer projected general attributes of the European Renaissance (visual art, architecture) into specific theatre productions based on the remaining archive material (stage designs, production photographs, video recordings, production reviews and similar) and personal communication with Jozef Ciller. The analyses also contain the identification of the transfer of the architecture and the scenography of the Elizabethan theatre Renaissance. Another line thanks to which the scenography for Shakespeare has been traced is the analyses of the Renaissance elements according to the location of the scenography – whether it was aiming for interior or exterior space. The scenography of Jozef Ciller elaborates on characteristics of renaissance exterior and interior architecture or creates, by its means, a new theatrical reality.  Even the original dramatic reality often works with motives of plays in the renaissance Elizabethan style: the space of the stage and the auditorium is united through an active display for the actors and their presentation. Such approach is typical for Ciller’s scenography in general, not just for Shakespeare’s plays. The result of the study is the that Ciller uses Renaissance (theatrical and nontheatrical) elements as motives while retaining the awareness of the Renaissance spirit and greatness of human beings.


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