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

works, which silently refers the reader [or viewer] to the original itself for details
and extensions.” (42).
Although not specifically designed for types of ekphrasis, but to
distinguish degrees of “pictorialism” in novels, Marianne Torgovnick’s
continuum describes different ways and degrees in which authors can involve the
visual arts in their work. 54 Her continuum starts with the “decorative use of visual
arts” which applies to descriptive passages that are influenced by the visual arts,
suggest an artistic movement, allude to an actual work or to novels in which one
or more of the characters are painters (14-17). The continuum continues with the
biographical use of the visual arts, which involves “showing how involvement
with the visual arts shaped [the author’s] psyche so as to influence aspects of the
author’s fiction” (18). In the ideological mode, authors represent major themes of
their work in aspects related to the visual arts. Authors may also use the visual
arts in this mode to derive a theory of fiction from art historical theories (19).
Finally, the interpretive use of the visual arts is subdivided into perceptual and
psychological uses, and “refers to ways in which characters experience art objects
or pictorial objects and scenes in a way that provokes their conscious or
unconscious minds” (22). This category emphasizes the perception and reception
of a work of art. Torgovnick’s continuum helps distinguish and compare uses of
the visual arts that are “typical of certain novelists or certain periods in the history
of the novel with those of other novelists or other periods” (14). My own system
54 Marianne Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James, Lawrence, Woolf
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985).
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