The Politics and Poetics of Ekphrasis in Nineteenth-Century French Art Novels
of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor David Ellison. No. of pages in text. (227) This dissertation explores how literary descriptions of visual artworks affect the narrative and descriptive fabric of a text. The novels I examine operate on three textual levels: the painter's creative struggles, his amorous entanglements with his model and/or the painted women of his canvas, and his aesthetic claims to revolutionize painting. My project argues that ekphrasis is a translational mode that takes two forms: the traditional, "contained" description of a visual artwork; and a mode of writing that pervades the entire text and emulates the characteristics of painting. For example, Balzac's "Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu" and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon successfully adopt the ekphrastic mode of writing, transforming the narrative into a canvas where the boundaries between the media are blurred. On the other hand, Zola's L'Œuvre exploits ekphrasis in order to advance the superiority of literature over painting. At the heart of these Realist and Naturalist texts, the fundamental adherence to the mimetic principle of art is confronted with the nonfigurative experiments of their fictional painters. The female body, as the embodiment of Art and the manifestation of the artist's desire, becomes the symptom of his incursion into abstract painting and the site of the resistance to ekphrasis. Acknowledgment I owe many thanks to my committee members, family, and friends, without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. I would like first and foremost to thank my dissertation director, Dr. David Ellison, for having been a dedicated mentor and advisor throughout my years at the University of Miami. His careful readings, timely feedback, and his intellectual guidance have been invaluable to the completion of this work. I would like to thank Dr. Ralph Heyndels for his continued support. From classes taken with him to informal and formal discussions about this work, Dr. Heyndels’ ability to ask the right questions, point to the gist of the matter, and see beyond the words on the page have been an inspiration. My most sincere thanks go to Dr. Barbara Woshinsky, a careful, attentive, and enthusiastic reader of this dissertation, who helped me edit and refine my arguments. I am also most grateful to Dr. Rebecca Brienen for agreeing to work with me on this project. Her intellectual rigor was challenging and she raised important questions that pushed me to think outside my box. All the faculty and staff at the University of Miami have been kind and generous, helping with administrative and intellectual matters; in particular Directors of Graduate Studies Dr. Gema Perez-Sanchez and Dr. Elena Grau-Lleveria, as well as Keyla Medina. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Jan Hokenson, my mentor and advisor at Florida Atlantic University. Her support and encouragement during my M.A. years gave me the confidence I needed as a student and her love for literature and literary analysis inspire me to this day.
Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery
As ancient as Homer's lines on the shield of Achilles and as recent as John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," ekphrasis is the art of describing works of art. Over the ages its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures - a museum that James Heffernan explores in this book. Profoundly ambivalent, ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. This contest is typically gendered: the voice of male speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening, male narrative seeking to overcome the fixating impact of beauty poised in space. Moving from the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to contemporary American poetry, this book presents a history of struggle between rival systems of representation. Heffernan also shows how this struggle changes. Poets ranging from Ovid to Shakespeare use verbalized depictions of rape to show the violence men do under the "colour" of their words; romantic poetry at once salutes and questions the transcendent beauty of visual art preserved in the newly born public museum. In the modern and postmodern eras, poets contend with all the words generated by museums themselves to regulate our experience of visual art.
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited