Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

Rhetoric, in which she proposes and illustrates a structuralist method of inter-art
comparisons that seeks parallels while being aware of impossibilities of structural
correspondences. Similar to Murray Krieger, Steiner defines ekphrasis as a
description of a “pregnant moment in painting,” that is as attempt to imitate the
visual arts by describing a still moment and thereby halting time. 18
EKPHRASIS AND IDEOLOGY
Whereas these critics have discussed the literature-art relationship largely
as an aesthetic one, critics from the late eighties on have tended to see the
relationship as socially and ideologically motivated, as a “dialectical struggle in
which the opposed terms take on different ideological roles and relationships at
different moments in history” (Mitchell, “Space” 98). W.J.T. Mitchell was one of
the first to discuss inter-art comparisons in terms of social relations. By showing
how Lessing in his Laokoon connects the difference between painting and poetry
to that between men and women and the English and the French influence,
Mitchell demonstrates how Lessing’s attempt to establish laws and borders to
distinguish the arts is permeated by a rhetoric of political economy and social,
gender relations. The laws of genre not only shift into laws of proper behavior for
each gender, but moreover function to segregate the arts in “an imperialist design
for absorption by the more dominant, expansive art” (“Space” 107).
18 Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1982) 41.
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