17413 Hauptseminar

Manfred Pfister

Ekphrasis and Postmodern Fiction
(Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, John Banville)

Ekphrasis, the 'verbal representation of visual representation', has had a great tradition in poetry ever since Homer's description of the shield of Achilles in the eighteenth book of the Iliad.

Poems about paintings or other works of art abound in all literatures from almost all periods, suggesting a close bond between the 'Sister Arts' or, conversely, rivalry and emulation as to which represents reality more faithfully or more persuasively. Realist novels, of course, have also involved the occasional description pieces of visual art: Just think of the many objets d'art featuring in Victorian novels down to the aestheticist abandon of The Picture of Dorian Gray!

I would claim, however, that in postmodernist fiction ekphrasis has become a central device. Here it serves the specifically postmodernist functions of opening up the arts to each other and blurring their boundaries ('inter-art', 'intermedia') and of foregrounding representationality by superimposing visual and literary representation one upon the other and confronting the different conditions of representation in the various arts.

This frequently involves a self-reflexive aspect: the postmodernist novel, by mirroring its own modes, conditions, limits, problems and aporias of representation in a work of visual art that features prominently within it, thus turns into metafiction.

We shall study the inter-art gestures and metafictional loops of ekphrasis in three contemporary English novels: Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989), John Banville's Athena (1995), and Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1995).

Of course, we shall discuss them not only in terms of their ekphrastic devices: all three of them are too rich and attractive to be reduced to one concern only. As, on the other hand, ekphrasis does not only enjoy a new renaissance within postmodernist fiction but concomitantly also within poststructuralist aesthetics, we shall discuss the role of ekphrasis in the contexts of theories of metafiction and intertextuality and of gender and media studies as well.

AT THE BEGINNING OF TERM YOU SHOULD HAVE READ at least two of the three novels - among them Barnes' History, our opening gambit - and one of the following theoretical texts:

• B. Dieterle: Erzählte Bilder: Zum narrativen Umgang mit Gemälden.
  Marburg 1988.
• W. Harms (ed.): Text und Bild, Bild und Text.
  Stuttgart 1990.
• Murray Krieger: Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign.
  Baltimore 1992.
• James A.W. Heffernan: Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery.
  Chicago 1993.
• P.V. Zima (ed.): Literatur intermedial.
  Darmstadt 1995.
• Word and Image. 14 (Fall 1998).
  Special issue on ekphrasis (ed. Mario Klarer).