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

fruitfully applied to poetic ekphrasis, but in my opinion cannot easily be
transferred to narrative or dramatic texts, let alone films. 53 Moreover, these
categories are largely distinguished by content, whereas I am interested in a
distinction that also caters to differences in form as well as quantitative and
qualitative aspects.
A few other critics have proposed categories that are more widely
applicable. I have already mentioned Tamar Yacobi’s categories of the
“ekphrastic model” and the “ekphrastic simile” in the previous chapter. Although
Yacobi does not attempt to develop a system of classifications, these concepts fill
a crucial gap by including heretofore neglected categories which are applicable to
all literary genres as well as film. The ekphrastic simile, like a rhetorical simile,
directly compares a tenor, or subject, to a vehicle. Thus, it is a very short, often
“glancing allusion to a visual art object” that, however, “compensates for the
minimum quantity by bringing the figure of speech into multiple cross-reference
and interconnectivity” (“Verbal” 42). Similarly, the ekphrastic model is a mere
brief allusion to a pictorial model or genre, by which the text can “abstract a bare
theme from a multiplicity of particularized visual sources” (“Ekphrastic” 26)
through mere hints or indirections. Yacobi’s call for including these two neglected
forms which previously may have been considered too brief and thus insignificant
or superficial to be considered ekphrastic, has important consequences for filmic
ekphrasis as well. The literary (and, as I would add, filmic) invocation of an
ekphrastic model or simile “is an abbreviated reference to a whole pictorial set of
53 Siglind Bruhn, however, does use the category of achievement and several of its subcategories
in her analysis of musical ekphrasis.
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