17198 Proseminar / Übung

Manfred Pfister

The Dialogue of Word and Image

There are poems that describe a piece of painting, drawing, or sculpture, the old rhetorical name for this is ekphrasis. There are paintings or drawings that illustrate literary texts. There are works of visual art with texts inscribed in them. And there are, finally, works of art that combine the verbal and the visual, Blake's illuminated poems, for instance, or modernist 'concrete poetry'.

We shall deal with all four modes of such a dialogue of word and image and pick our examples from all periods of English literature from the Renaissance to the present. We shall begin with the dialogue of Painter and Poet in the first scene of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (which you are expected to have read when term starts) and end with a post-colonialist poem from David Dabydeen's Turner (1994), in between we shall assemble our own anthology of case studies.

Participants should have a keen interest in both poetry and the visual arts. Guests, i.e. students who do not need a 'Proseminarschein', are welcome but must also be prepared to contribute a presentation. There is a magazine dedicated entirely to our concerns, Word & Image (1985ff.), the autumn 1998 number of which focuses on ekphrasis, stimulating preparatory reading is also offered in Murray Krieger: Ekphrasis. Baltimore 1992.; Klaus Dirscherl (ed.): Bild und Text im Dialog. Passau 1993.; Peter Wagner (ed.): Icons - Texts - Iconotexts. Berlin 1996..