English Free topic B: Words about Things: the Portrait, Ekphrasis and the limits of language

Lene Østermark-Johansen:

How do you sum up an individual? This course is open to all active students who wish to explore the links between the visual and the literary portrait through a range of genres such as the (auto)biography, the (dramatic) monologue, the confessional or epistolary genre, the allegory, the novel, etc. It involves such issues as ‘portraits - masks or mirrors?’; ‘portraits and power’; ‘the relationship between self, artist, sitter, and audience’; ‘the image of the poet in art and literature’; ‘portraits of the past’; ‘portraits in fiction’ and whatever other issues participants may wish to raise. Indeed, what is a portrait to you? The course does not confine itself to one literary period, but encompasses such subjects as the allegorical Renaissance portrait explored through the link between the body of the Queen and the body politick in visual depictions of Elizabeth I; Romantic self-fashioning in artists’ self-portraits, in images of the Romantic poets and in the blurred lines between the poet and the poetic ‘I’ in the writings of Byron, Shelley and Keats; nineteenth-century portraits of the past in paintings by Leighton and in poems by Browning, in Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits; the relation between surface and symbol, artist and sitter in some of Oscar Wilde’s writings; the Impressionist portrait and modernist writing in James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928).

Charles Lock:

Whenever we describe whatever is not a text (called a thing) we are engaging in ekphrasis. Words are most conveniently used to describe other words and this verbal activity we know as commentary, criticism or simply conversation. It is when we have to describe a thing that we feel challenged by the inadequacy of language. There is a familiar frustration when we try to search on google for a thing—a piece of furniture, a pattern, a vase—for which we have no name or other verbal identification. It is this sense of challenge that has given ekphrasis a prestigious place in literature, though customarily restricted to verbal descriptions of works of human artifice: buildings, sculptures, vases, paintings (notably portraits), photographs, performances. The tradition of ekphrasis can be traced back to Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad (Book XVIII) and extends, in English, through Chaucer and Shakespeare to the present. Theoretical and historical readings will include G.E. Lessing, Laökoon (1766), W. J.T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’ from Picture Theory

(1994), etc.