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.
La Chair du Chef-d'œuvre inconnu
À partir de la phénoménologie de la chair de Merleau-Ponty, l'on montre comment « le chef-d'œuvre inconnu » de Frenhofer – le peintre inventé par Balzac – qui apparaît comme une « muraille de peinture » sous laquelle une figure est oblitérée, est le fruit d'un travail de la chair où le désir du peintre s'est superposé à son regard.
Criteria for Describing Word-and-Image Relations
There is a great and quickly increasing number of studies on wordand-image relations, but few efforts have been made as yet to make explicit the general problems underlying this kind of research. I see at least two central problems, one methodological and one taxonomic. The former concerns the legitimacy of composing verbal and visual artifacts or transferring methods used in one field to the other field, the identity or difference in the meaning of our critical idiom when it is applied, simultaneously or separately, in both fields, and so on.' The methodological approach requires a well-chosen point of departure; thus Wendy Steiner (1982) picks up the historical "ut pictura poesis" tradition and tries to examine it in the light of modern, especially semiotic, criticism, whereas Manfred Muckenhaupt (1986) examines the current methods of comparing words and images from the point of view of modern linguistics, Gottfried Boehm (1978, 1986) and Oskar Batschmann (1977) from that of modern philosophy (especially aesthetics and hermeneutics). The second general problem is more practical. Facing the tremendous variety of phenomena which belong to word-and-image research, one would like to find some very general categories or headings which would allow a clear and comprehensive classification of all these phe-