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

oth in terms of racial otherness as the seen vs. the unmarked identity, and in
terms of gender as the “expression of a duel between male and female gazes”
(Heffernan 1).
Despite these ideological battles, Mitchell has argued that there is no
essential difference between the two arts. 22 In other words, neither are the visual
arts “inherently spatial, static, corporeal, and shapely,” nor are “arguments,
addresses, ideas, and narratives” proper to language. Although the visual and
verbal media are different “at the level of sign-types, forms, materials of
representation, and institutional traditions” (Picture 161), Mitchell emphasizes
that semantically, that is, in terms of “expressing intentions and producing effects
in a viewer/listener, there is no essential difference between texts and images”
(ibid. 160). Thus, in contrast to the restrictive, cautionary warnings of earlier
critics, for Mitchell “the problem is that we have not gone nearly far enough in
our exploration of text-image relations” (“Going Too Far” 2). The emphasis has
thus not only shifted from an aesthetic to a social focus, but also from moderation
to encouragement and excess.
However, as Bernhard F. Scholz has shown, the problem today is that
there is also an excess of definitions, and that the concept of ekphrasis refers to a
range of practices rather than to a distinct corpus or genre of texts. Ekphrasis has
been variously defined as a rhetorical figure, that is, in terms of its effect on the
listener; as a rhetorical exercise, that is, “as a term for a (descriptive) genre
22 “Space” 98; Picture 159-62; and “Going Too Far With The Sister Arts,” Space, Time, Image,
Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. James A.W. Heffernan (New York: Peter
Lang, 1987) 1-10.
10