Pictorial as readable: ekphrasis in a literary work and reader’s perception

The concept of ekphrasis, its use in literary works. Review of the study of ekphrasis in literary studies and cultural studies: modern trends of study. Examples of description of ekphrasis in English poetry and prose, verbal means of its formation.

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Pictorial as readable: ekphrasis in a literary work and reader's perception

L. Semerenko

Associate Professor of the European and Oriental Languages and Translation Department, Alfred Nobel University, Dnipro

A. Pliushchai

Senior Lecturer of the European and Oriental Languages and Translation Department, Alfred Nobel University, Dnipro

У статті зосереджено увагу на понятті екфразису, його використанні в літературних творах.

Метою дослідження є з'ясувати статус-кво в дослідженнях екфразису в літературознавстві та культурології.

Для досягнення поставленої мети були використані наступні методи дослідження: культурно-естетичний, компаративний та герменевтичний.

Зроблено спробу розглянути та проаналізувати сучасні тенденції у вивченні екфрасису щодо його визначення, типології, функцій, екфрастичних жанрових інваріантів та читацького сприйняття екфрасису.

Розглянуто деякі зразкові приклади опису екфрасису в англійській екфрастичній поезії та прозі, а також проаналізовано вербальні засоби формування екфрасису.

Проаналізувавши визначні праці відомих відчизняних та закордонних науковців, а саме: Н.С. Бочкарьової, Л. Геллера, Н.Н. Єфімової, А.Ю. Криворучко, В. Каннінгхема, Дж. Холландера, Л. Шпіцера та ін., вдалося зробити висновок про те, що багато вчених використовують визначення екфрасису як «поетичного опису живописного чи скульптурного твору мистецтва», запропоноване Лео Шпіцером.

Однак визначення екфразису як «вербального відображення візуального зображення» Джеймса Хеффермана, який надає більш широке поняття, також є дуже популярним.

Екфразис у сучасних дослідженнях є багатогранним і поліфункціональним явищем. Типологію екфрасису та його основні функції подано переважно на основі творчості конкретного поета чи письменника, звертаючи увагу на деякі загальні риси екфрасису, що поєднує у вербальному дискурсі портретні та знакові образи.

Дослідження феномену екфрасис заслуговує на подальший розгляд, зокрема, через наявність книги автора Ліліан Лувель The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism, яка пропонує новаторський підхід до розуміння взаємозв'язків між літературним текстом та зображенням.

Ключові слова: екфрашс, образотворче мистецтво, екфрастичний дискурс, жанрові інваріанти, інтермедіальність, читацьке сприйняття, інтертекстуальність, екфрастичний погляд.

PICTORIAL AS READABLE: EKPHRASIS IN A LITERARY WORK AND READER'S PERCEPTION

Lubov I. Semerenko, Alfred Nobel University (Ukraine).

Oleksandr O. Pliushchai, Alfred Nobel University (Ukraine).

Key words: ekphrasis, visual art, ekphrastic discourse, genre invariants, intermediality, reader's perception, intertextuality, ekphrastic gaze.

The interaction of arts which poets, writers, artists, scholars and philosophers have always paid considerable attention, has gained popularity recently and it has been given serious consideration in art history, literary and cultural studies, and aesthetics. Some researchers explain a growing interest in the phenomenon of increasing significance of visuality in modern culture.

The aim of the article is to clarify the status quo in the study of ekphrasis in literary and cultural studies. To achieve the aim pursued, the following research methods have been used: cultural-aesthetic, comparative and hermeneutic.

The paper focuses on the concept of ekphrasis and its use in literary works and studies the current trends in the study of ekphrasis, regarding its definition, typology, functions, ekphrastic genre invariants, and reader's perception of ekphrasis. Some exemplary instances of ekphrasis description in English ekphrastic poetry and emotive prose have been considered, and the verbal means of ekphrasis generation have been analysed.

The analysis of the most popular works of domestic and foreign scholars such as: N.S. Bochkareva, L. Geller, N.N. Yefimova, A.Yu. Krivoruchko, V. Cunningham, J. Hollander, L. Spitzer and many others, has allowed to make the conclusion that most scholars use the definition of ekphrasis as a “poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art” suggested by Leo Spitzer, although, the definition of ekphrasis as a “verbal representation of visual representation” of James Hefferman, which is a broader concept is also popular.

Different classifications of ekphrasis have been suggested by the researchers. N. Braginskaya, for instance, distinguishes the dialogical and monological ekphrasis on the basis of the internal structure of the text, the main difference being the manner of presenting information to the reader.

The typology of ekphrasis and its main functions are mainly given on the basis of creative works of a particular writer or poet and many researchers pay attention to sense general features of ekphrasis as the process which combines iconic and sign images in verbal discourse. Ekphrasis, being the representation of other arts in literature, expands considerably the narrative space.

The origin of ekphrasis goes back to the ancient times where it is seen as a rhetorical device. In classical rhetoric, ekphrasis could refer virtually to any extended description of art objects.

Ekphrasis, an ancient rhetorical term, has been now revived in academic circles, in the studies of art and literature. After languishing in obscurity until 1967, when Murray Krieger published a notable essay on it, ekphrasis is commanding major attention, “ploughing the inexhaustibly fertile ground where literature meets visual arts”. There are various approaches to the study of the ekphrastic tradition, and the historical approach being one of them, can be seen in many works.

Ekphrasi in modern research is a multifaceted and polyfunctional phenomenon. The typology of ekphrasis and its main functions are mainly given on the basis of the particular poet's or writer's creative works, paying attention to some general features of ekphrasis which combines iconic and sign images in verbal discourse.

The phenomenon of ekphrasis merits further consideration, especially, due to the availability of Lil- iane Louvel's The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism, which provides the author's innovative approach to the understanding of the relationships between the literary text and image.

The interaction of arts which poets, writers, artists, scholars and philosophers always paid considerable attention, has gained popularity recently and it has been given serious consideration in art history, literary and cultural studies, and aesthetics.

The aim of the article is to clarify the status quo in the study of ekphrasis in literary and cultural studies. To achieve the aim pursued, the following research methods have been used: cultural-aesthetic, comparative and hermeneutic.

Ekphrasis, an ancient rhetorical term, has been now revived in academic circles, in the studies of art and literature. After languishing in obscurity until 1967, when Murray Krieger published a notable essay on it (Essay the Ekphrastic principle and the Still Movement, or Laocoon

Revisited), ekphrasis is commanding major attention, “ploughing the inexhaustibly fertile ground where literature meets visual arts”.

Some researchers explain a growing interest in the phenomenon of increasing significance of visuality in modern culture. The most popular works of N. Bochkareva [Bochkareva, 1994; Bochkareva, 2014; Bochkareva, Novokreshchennyh, 2017], L. Geller [Geller, 2013], N. Gorbina [Gorbina, 2020], N.N. Yefimova [Yefimova, 2019], A. Krivoruchko [Krivoruchko, 2009], O. Lebedeva [Lebedeva, 2017], E. Tarannikova [Tarannikova, 2007], L. Clarridge [Clarridge, 2015], V. Cunningham [Cunningham, 2014], J. Hollander [Hollander, 1995], L. Spitzer [Spitzer, 1955] and many others have been under consideration during the research.

The origin of ekphrasis goes back to the ancient times where it is seen as a rhetorical device. In classical rhetoric, ekphrasis could refer virtually to any extended description of art objects.

Leo Spitzer indicates that ekphrasis has been known from Homer to Teocritus to the Parnassians and Rilke, as a poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art. Homer's description of the shield of Achilles made by the god Hephaestus in The Illiad is usually given as an example of an early ekphrastic text.

Ekphrasis is the subject of scholarly debate and no unanimous opinion exists regarding its definition, interpretation and its boundaries, though many theoretical works are denoted to the study of the relationship between the verbal and the visual (e.g. Tom Mitchell [Mitchell, 1994], Ruth Webb [Webb, 1999], James Hefferman [Hefferman, 1993], Nina Braginskaya [Braginskaya, 1977], Leo Geller [Geller, 2013], Juri Lotman [Lotman, 1992], etc.).

There are various approaches to the study of the ekphrastic tradition, and the historical approach being one of them, can be seen, for instance, in James Hefferman's The Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis; the study of ekphrastic poetry; Michael Benton's historical survey of the role of the spectator; and Valentine Cunningham's overview of ekphrastic tradition that takes into account instance of narrative fiction. Cunningham's establishment of the tradition of ekphrasis, as N. Gorbina notes, as a cyclical tradition, narratologically guided by the “ekphrastic gaze” on different levels of discourse, gives a new impetus and vigour to the academic discourse on ekphrasis and inspires a number of questions.

Among various definitions of ekphrasis, we can find the definition of ekphrasis by L. Geller as a rhetorico-narratological device of action suspension, digression, which is a vivid depiction of any object of art, the reproduction of one art by means of other arts [Geller, 2013, p. 44-60].

A specific feature of classical ekphrasis is a strong emotional impact produced on the listener and the outburst of emotions. Ju. Lotman states that the point of emotional outburst is simultaneously the moment of a considerable increase of informativity of the whole system which occurs at the expense of the violation of genre borders [Lotman, 2010, p. 170].

Ruth Webb believes that the presence of the represented art object gives a powerful emotional impulse [Webb, 1999, p. 7-18].

According to J. Hefferman's laconic definition, ekphrasis is “the verbal representation of visual representation”. Murray Krieger and Wendy Steiner portray ekphrasis as literature's most successful attempt at overcoming its narrative properties to adopt the static quality of the visual arts. Literature increases its semioticity by means of other arts and one of the consequences of these processes is intermediality [Hefferman, 1993, p. 217].

Ekphrasis, the term of Byzantine rhetoric, used in relation to the description of art objects, its role and meaning changed from one epoch to another. The term lost its original meaning of literary works of Romantics, who made the theme of art and artist the focal point of their creative works. The main function of ekphrasis in the period of Romanticism is to intensify the emotional reaction to the work of art in order to cause a similar reaction of the reader. The ekphrastic descriptive model, starting from the epoch of Romanticism and till present, is characterised by the prevalence of the interpretative component of the description and the use of a wide range of lingual means which reflect the nuances of the authorial perception and interpretation or the work of art. Ekphrasis in moredn research is a multifaceted and polyfunctional phenomenon.

The typology of ekphrasis and its main functions are mainly given on the basis of creative works of a particular writer or poet and many researchers pay attention to sense general features of ekphrasis as the process which combines iconic and sign images in verbal discourse. Ekphrasis, being the representation of other arts in literature, expands considerably the narrative space.

Different classifications of ekphrasis have been suggested by the researchers. N. Braginskaya, for instance, distinguishes the dialogical and monological ekphrasis on the basis of the internal structure of the text, the main difference being the manner of presenting information to the reader [Braginskaya, 1977, р. 264].

Ye. Yatsenko gives the most detailed classification of ekphrasis types, dividing them into di- rect/implicit and indirect/explicit (according to the object of description); mimetic and non-mi- metic (according to the presence or absence of the real art object in the history of culture); full, motivating and zero (according to the size of the described) [Yatsenko, 2006, p. 208].

John Hollander uses the terms “actual” ekphrasis (referring to the existing works of visual arts) and “notional” ekphrasis (relating to the imagined/fictitious object of art). Literature often incorporates music, painting, theatre, sculpture and this process enriches literary works and helps the readers perceive the surrounding world/reality from different perspectives [Hollander, 1995, p. 106].

The play of imagination is an expected result of ekphrasis which allows to understand the author's feelings at the moment of writing/creating a literary work.

Probably, as N. Bochkareva notes, sensory perception is a priority for the author of an ek- phrastic description as compared with intellectual perception [Bochkareva, 2014, p. 69].

Ekphrasis, an artistic device, the basis for which is intersemiotic transference, combines in itself the features of intermediality (interaction of related arts) and intertextuality (citation, cop- ying/imitating the style and form). The study of intertextuality is based on the critical hypothesis that every work of literature is, in certain various ways, affected by prior texts [Suyitno, 2017, pp. 86-97].

The criteria for demarcation line between a common description of a referent and ek- phrasis, as pointed out by N. Efimova, must be the following: expressiveness, narrativeness, representation, reproduction and imagery [Yefimova, 2019, p. 107].

As Peter Wagner states “on the one hand, ekphrastic texts reveal crucial insights about the art of their time (insights, to be sure, we may want to modify and adapt to our “eyes”) and, on the other hand, and they also unveil strategies of writing the powerlines of critical discourse and aesthetic response” [Wagner, 1996, p. 31].

What attracted and still attracts writers and poets to ekphrasis? The need to combine different codes within one text, as Yu. Lotman sees it, can be explained by the fact that the hierarchy of different codes is a more siutable and compact way of preserving information than multiplying messages in one language.

The verbal description of a painting, as text within text, is a means of creating such hierarchy.

G. Lessing claimed that it is sufficient for a writer only to name a notion in order to illustrate it. But an artist forms a visual image that stirs creative imagination and emotions. Emotional response of the reader this is what is expected.

According to James A.W. Hefferman, ekphrastic poetry turns a work of art into a story that expresses the mind of the speaker; and ekphrastic fiction turns the work of art - whether still or moving - that mirrors the mind of the character... Finally and simply then, ekphrasis is a kind of writing that turns pictures in the storytelling words [Hefferman, 1993, p. 47].

Writing about visual art often reveals as much about the observer as it does about the art, and thus they (the authors) turn to ekphrasis for its potential no multiply the lenses through which to do that seeing.

Many writers and poets responded to a work of visual arts in their literary works, transposing the message from the visual to the verbal, thus joining intermedial practice.

The gallery of ekphrastic pictures can be found in Victorian fiction, in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Thomas Hardy's An Imaginative Woman.

The 20th century writers, such as D.H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf also often resorted to ekphrasis. Jack Stewart, the author of numerous accounts of D.H. Lawrence's art movement influences, compares D.H. Lawrence's writing to Paul Gauguin's Primitivist style paintings, calling Gauguin “a writing painter” and Lawrence “a painting writer”. Stewart introduces the terms “art speech”, “verbal brushstrokes”, which became common for the analysis of Lawrence's works.

According to Liliane Louvel, Virginia Woolf's writing “is strangely marked by the presence of the visual... it is inscribed in her writing and thus is a part and parcel of its literary quality. The visual is remarkably staged by the insistence of Woolf's narrators on seeing and watching, for instance, “The Fascination of the Pool”, “The symbol”, “The Lady in the Looking Glass: a Reflection”.

In “Three Pictures” we can read: “It is impossible that one should not see pictures; because if my father was a blacksmith and yours a peer of the realm, we must needs be pictures to each other. Seeing/thinking in pictures, visual thinking or imagination is of primary importance in V. Woolf's short stories.

Portrait as a painting genre often becomes the object of ekphrastic description as, for instance, in Edgar Allan Poe's The Oval Portrait or Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. In this case, the portrait description correlates somehow with the character's specific traits and features.

Ekphrasis occupies a special place in the aesthetic system of John Fowles, one of the greatest representatives of the 20th century intellectual prose. One can observe pictorial, musical, architectural/sculptural and photographic ekphrases in J. Fowles's novels. In his debut novel “The Collector” the reader comes across many ekphrastic descriptions. The main character, Miranda Grey (kidnapped by a young clerk, butterfly collector) is the student of Art College and many entries in her diary are connected with fine arts. Miranda's reflections about art and the way she sees herself in it are given in the following passage which illustrates a complete ekphrasis: “I want to paint like Berthe Morisot. I don't mean with her colours or forms or anything physical, but with her simplicity and light. I don't want to be clever or great or “significant” or given all that clumsy masculine analysis. I want to paint light on children's faces, or flowers in a hedge or a street of April rain.

According to Stefan Horlacher, “visual perception, observation, recognition, ignorance, estimation and interpretation are the key issues of nearly any text of Fowles's works, and there is an acknowledged desire to venture into the powerful interaction of image and word”. In The Ebony Tower, the underlying symbolic plot transforms the whole text into the dynamic ekphrasis or a pictorial model of Breasley's paintings. “Breasley had granted himself pride of place and space - over the old stone fireplace in the centre of the room. There hung the huge Moon-hunt, perhaps the best-known of the Coёtminah oeuvre, a painting David was going to discuss at some lengths and that he badly wanted to study at leisure again... perhaps not least to confirm to himself that he wasn't overrating the subject. He felt faintly relieved that the picture stood well to renews acquaintance - he hadn't seen it in the flesh since the Tate exhibition of four years previously - and even announced itself better than memory and reproductions had rated it. As with so much of Breasley's work there was an obvious previous iconography in this case, Ucello's Night Hunt [Horlacher, 2000, p. 46].

A specific atmosphere of creative confrontation of artists which reflects the challenges of modern art is created by numerous allusions to the canvases of great artists - the representatives of different countries, various styles and artistic movements and tendencies. And each of them, in their own way are very important for the main character. The use of ekphrasis in literary work helps to expand, deepen and explicate the key episodes of narration. It can also contain the information about the author's view of the world and characteristics of the epoch, and it can influence the reader's perception of the plot.

Ekphrasis in a literary work can contribute to the depiction of the character's inner world, as in A.S. Byatt's Chinese Lobster. The reproductions of Henri Matise paintings are hanging on the walls in Peggy Nollett's studio.

Ekphrasis can perform different functions in a literary work. Every poet or writer includes a verbal description of an art object/artefact in the narrative or poetic discourse not incidentally, but for some reasons. The use of ekphrasis can be connected with the epoch/time of a literary work creation and a certain worldview of the author. The mode of thinking and literary traditions have also a considerable impact on the significance of the work of art for both society as a whole and a poet/writer, in particular. The functions of ekphrasis are also connected with the author's attitude to art.

Taking into account the artistic modes in literature, N. Bochkareva distinguishes the following narratological functions of ekphrasis: metanarrative, chronotopic, parodying, compositional, allegorical and didactic.

In Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, for instance, the ekphrastic dialogue of John Bidlake with his listeners whom he explains the painting performs a didactic function: “It's good... Look at the way it is composed. Look at the figure on the right with arms up”... Expressing the opinion of an expert and acting as an art connoisseur, an enlightener, the narrator contributes to the didactic function of ekphrasis, alongside with the descriptive function.

A. Krivoruchko suggests symbolic, characterizing, mediative functions, and the function separating the author's (position) opinion from that of a character [Krivoruchko, 2009, p. 18].

Assessing Jane Austin's use of ekphrasis in her novels, Peter Sabor (as noted by Wagner) is concerned with the narratological and semantic functions of images described and discussed in the words. Far from serving merely decorative purposes, these pictures, Sabor argues, are used to reveal psychological nuances in the novels' characters and to explore the dynamics of their relationships. Austin's invented images are, in Sabor terms, “speaking pictures”, discussed within the novels by the characters and designed to be discussed outside her fiction by her readers.

According to M. Torgovnik, the use of visual arts in literary works (of Henry James, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf) is bibliographical, decorative, ideological and interpretative, further subdivided into to hermeneutical and perceptual. For instance, Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady illustrates the interpretative-perceptual use of visual arts, when the perception of a literary work is connected with the personage's psychological characteristics [Torgovnik, 1985, p. 257].

Ekphrasis as a device, artistic, literary, rhetorico-narratological is a “text within text”, the description of a work of art in a particular literary genre. The aim of such device is to realize pictorial-expressive potential of the interaction of different arts.

The works of fiction and non-fiction, travel writing, in which ekphrasis is a plot-forming element of their compositional structure represent the ekphrastic genre. Any literary work belonging to the ekphrastic genre is characterized by a wide range of language expressive means on the linguistic level.

One can observe the use of the nomination of non-lingual (iconic signs or lexis, nominating the works of art, e.g. painting, picture, portrait;

- thematical lexis pertaining to a certain art: canvas, colours, easel, painter, studio;

- perceptive lexis relating to the process of visual perception of the work of art: gaze, glance, look, see, stare, view, watch;

- perceptive emotive-evaluative lexis referring to the interpretation and aesthetic reflection of the artwork: affect, be amazed/bothered/delighted, study, wonder.

Various expressive means and stylistic devices (metaphor, simile, hyperbole, etc.) of ekphrasis actualization are used to convey the specific features of the poetic world of a literary work.

The following genre invariants can be distinguished within the English ekphrastic discourse: ekphrastic novel, “Kunstlerroman”, the narrative is built around a particular art object - for instance, Virginia Woolf's “Three Pictures” referring to Edvard Munch's The Scream or Julian Barnes's “A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters” and the painting “The Raft of the Medusa by Gericault”, or A.S. Byatt's “The Matisse stories” and Henri Matisse's “Le Silence habite des maisons”;

- ekphrastic poetry (which includes a poetic description or interpretation of an existing or fictional work of art) is represented by such subgenres as ode, epigram, elegy, e.g. John Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; W. Wordsworth's Elegiac Stanzas or W.D. Snodgrass's Van Gogh: The Starry Night.

The ekphrastic poems allusions to the existing masterpieces of art, for which the world- known canvases by Pieter Bruegel the Elder's “The Fall of Iracus”, Vincent Van Gogh's “The Starry Night” and Rembrandt's “The Return of the Prodigal Son” served as mimetic referents, include W.H. Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts and W.C. Williams's Lanscape with the “Fall of Icarus”; Anne Saxton's “The Starry Night” and A. Bishop's “The Prodigal”.

- The genre of ekphrastic cycle comprises emotive prose cycle and lyrical ekphrastic cycle.

Anthony Powell's twelve-volume cycle A Dance to the Music of Time takes its name from the painting by the French artist Nicolas Poussin “La Danse des Saisons, ou l'Image de la vie humaine”, now in the Wallace Collection in London. The ekphrastic novel cycle starts with “A Question of Upbringing” and covers some fifty years in the life of a man of letters Nick Jenkins, the narrator, and the circles he inhabits.

The characters, like the Four Seasons in Poussin's painting, are all engaged in a ritual danse to the music of true. At the very beginning of “A Question of Upbringing” Nick Jenkins is pondering over the painting of Poussin.

Anthony Powell, an enthusiast of painting, who has been a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in London for some time, often turns to the art of painting in his novels. The description of the character's appearance via a well-known portrait is often used by the writer. The appearance of his characters is correlated with the portraits of Goya, Th. Gainsborough, Rubens. The protagonist, a gifted writer, perceives the existing reality in the context of the art world. The mundane is perceived metaphorically as allusions. And such representation strategy of the narrator allows to reveal the inner world of Nick Jenkins.

Hillary Spurling's Handbook to Anthony Powell's Music of Time testifies to an important role the interaction of arts plays in the ekphrastic novel sequence of Anthony Powell, who is sometimes called “the English Proust”.

The British poet Pascale Petit, inspired by the paintings of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, wrote “What the Water Gave Me”: Poems after Frida Kahlo, a collection of fifty-three ekphrastic poems.

According to Pascal Petit, her writing process involved looking closely and deeply at Kahlo's paintings “until I feel a trance that felt true and fresh”. In a poem “Diego on my Mind” the poet responded to Kahlo's surrealistic self-portrait, in which the artist depicts herself wearing a lace head-dress: “a lace cobweb framing my face”, and Diego Rivera's image painted on her forehead.

- And on the counterpane of my brow

just where the pillows would rest

I have painted your portrait...

Pascale Petit spent the first part of her life as a sculptor, having trained as a sculptural artist at the Royal College of Art. In her interview she says “I shape my poems around images, or arrange them, as if they are installations to work into sensory creations where I can play, however dark the subject. Literature is important because it can transform the pain of life into beauty. I don't think I should hide the pain, but it has this magical ability to transform, to change “what happened” into “what happens in the art” [Petit, 2018].

A.S. Byatt, in her study on ekphrastic portraiture, explains the phenomenon of writing as the author's appeal to the reader's imagination via verbal images.

The reader should possess cultural knowledge to produce image, without cultural literacy, the call issued by the painting will remain unheard. In his/her mind the reader, to decode the meaning should actively engage with a text in a way termed by A.S. Byatt as “constructive visualising work”, and described by Wolfgang Iser as “the picturing” done by our imagination, i. e. an activity through which with form the “gestalt” of a literary text.

Perception as a dialectic eye and mind depends on the reader's (innocent, ignorant or informed) pre-existing and recollected knowledge, the pre-existing familiarity with works of art.

The reader is usually invited by a narrator, protagonist or any other character to experience and mentally reconstruct the described painting.

Peter Wagner claims that “spatial work of art doesn't speak... but we can always perceive them as potential discourse. That is to say these silent works in fact are already talkative, full of virtual discourses” [Wagner, 2014, p. 414].

Micke Bal in Reading Rembrandt urges us to consider pictures as rhetoric or encoded signs that must and can be read with the tools provided by narratology and poststructural theories.

As established by V. Cunningham three manifestations of the gaze at the intra-and extra- textual levels of discourse are as follows: the gaze of the writer/poet, the gaze of the character, and the gaze of the reader. According to Cunningham, the latter two are directed by the writer/ poet. At the same time, as noted by N. Gorbina, the activity of the reader as an ekphrastic beholder, stems from an encounter with an ekphrastic or ekphrastically motivated images of art and insists in what A. S. Byatt refers to as “a constructive visualising work” [Cunningham, 2014, pp. 37-41].

While the reader as an ekphrastic beholder is invited to engage in the (de-/re-) construction of the meanings of a text, he/she, too, emerges as a sociocultural manifestation of the (pseudo-) connoisseur as long as he/she is guided by the author's inherently manipulative as grounded in the authority of the extratextual referent of ekphrasis. The ekphrastic beholder is guided by his/ her reliance upon knowledge of art and art history.

The phenomenon of ekphrasis merits further consideration, especially, due to the availability of Liliane Louvel's The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism, which provides the author's innovative approach to the understanding of the relationships between the literary text and image.

Bibliography

ekphrasis english poetry prose verbal

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23Wagner, P. (1996). Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality - the State(s) of the Art(s). In P. Wagner (ed.). Icons-Texts-Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Berlin, New York, Walter de Gruyter Publ., pp. 1-43.

24Webb, R. (1999). Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern. The Invention of a Genre. Word and Image, vol.15, issue 1, pp. 7-18.

25Yatsenko, E.V. (2006). Obrazy vizualnyh iskusstv v tvorchestve Dzh. Faulza (namaterialeromana “Vol- hv"). Diss. kand. filol. nauk [Images of visual arts in the J. Fowles's work (based on the material of the novel "The Magus”). Cand. philol. sci. diss.]. Moscow, 250 p.

26Yefimova, N.N. (2019). Perevod ekfrasisa: fenomenologiya tretyego otrazheniya [Translation of ekphrasis: the phenomenology of the third reflection]. Russkii yazyk i kultura v zerkale perevoda [Russian Language and Culture in the Translation Mirror], vol. 1, pp. 102-113.

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