32102

WiSe 17/18: Patrolling Boundaries, Mediating Differences: Ekphrasis and the Contemporary Novel

Caroline Heuer

Kommentar

Ekphrasis – the verbal representation of visual art – is a literary device prominently employed by a number of contemporary U.S. novelists such as Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner, Siri Hustvedt and Ben Lerner. Their fictional representations of artworks and the experiences they elicit form an aesthetic discourse that functions as a gateway to analyze different conceptions of the American novel in the 21st century: its aesthetic strategies, communicative potential, and cultural significance. Key for this analysis is the concept of ekphrasis which has undergone considerable changes over the course of its two-thousand-year-long history. From an exercise in rhetoric, it has turned into a site for an often hostile competition between word and image and a means to reflect on the specificity of medial forms and aesthetic qualities. It has been used as a meta-fictional device, vehicle for art criticism and catalyst for remediation. This seminar will retrace these changing conceptions of ekphrasis and the challenges it faces in light of the conceptual turn of the twentieth century (characterized by dematerialization, de-objectification and de-aestheticization). What happens when literature sets out not only to represent statues and paintings but performance pieces, video installations, conceptual works and land art? Schließen

14 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Di, 14:00 - 16:00 14 Termine

Di, 24.10.2017 14:00 - 16:00

Dozenten:
Caroline Heuer