| POSITIONING HISdescriptions
of ekphrastic experience among a scale of three points ("ekphrastic indifference,
ekphrastic hope and ekphrastic fear"), Mitchell identifies the concept
with a fundamental tendency in all linguistic expression through imagination
and metaphor. The stated goal of ekphrastic hope might be called "the overcoming
of others." According to Mitchell, "ekphrastic fear is the moment of resistance
or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the difference between
the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative,
imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually."
Mitchell leads readers through specific discussions of Williams, Keats,
Stevens and especially Shelley, reading the manuscript poem "On
the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery" into his
argument. Of this poem he says, "If ekphrasis, as a verbal representation
of a visual representation, is an attempt to repress or ‘take dominion’
over language’s graphic Other, then Shelley’s Medusa is the return of that
repressed image, teasing us out of thought with a vengeance." In discussing
this poem Mitchell argues that gender is one among many figures of difference
that energize the dialectic of the imagetext. Mitchell (like Murray
Krieger) suggest that ekphrastic digressions aim to be all of literature
in miniature. Mitchell thinks that ekphrasis is "one of the keys to difference
within language (both ordinary and literary) and that it focuses the interarticulation
of perceptual, semiotic, and social contradictions within verbal representation."
(Jean Jacobson.) |