Introduction: Encounters between Trauma and Ekphrasis, Words and Images

Abstract

This book seeks to question a juncture, or crossing, between two different discourses or fields of investigation: trauma and ekphrasis. It responds to the recognition that terrorizing images permeate the public sphere in connection with traumatic experiences and conflicts and emphasizes the ways in which such images are described and interpreted in words. Its main intention is to analyze the incorporation of verbally represented images – mental images, media images, and artistic images – in literary texts and to discuss their form and function. The importance of images in the context of political conflicts has been scrutinized in recent criticism, but scholarly attention to their verbal representations is less widespread. This book argues that an examination of the concept and practice of ekphrasis is crucial to understanding how the images in question work and that a foregrounding of their diverse effects and functions in contemporary literature is vital for illuminating and understanding such images. Contemporary literature is analyzed here in the context of its engagement with visual culture in a broader present-day and historic perspective. The interpretations demonstrate how literature provides a meeting place between trauma and the visual image. Rather than scrutinizing this encounter as though it were exclusively the object of visual or cultural studies, we emphasize the specificity of the literary engagement with visual images. This entails neither jettisoning the traditional concept of ekphrasis, typically defined as encompassing “a verbal representation of a visual representation” (Heffernan 2004: 3), nor uncritically reproducing its traditional function, but rather subjecting it to scrutiny and, where necessary, to displacement. The force of this displacement can in part be observed in how contributors seek new turns of phrase – such as “ekphrastic inversion,” “speculative ekphrasis,” and “phantomogenic ekphrasis” – to describe the ekphrastic dimension of the texts interpreted. As the contributions to this volume will show, a traditional interpretation of ekphrasis as also encompassing a wider field of engagement, including pictorial energeia, also underlines how the concept suffers transformation as it travels into new historical and discursive zones. One might construe ekphrasis as a conceptual dinosaur from an earlier age, when literary analysis had yet to face any real challenge from visual studies or