Last week at the conference Writing in a Post-Derridean Era at Växjö University with the paper Digital Ekphrasis. Word/image-relations in the age of the computer, a connection between the transitory aspect of digital text that Derrida describes in Paper Machine and the Quintilian notion of ekphrasis – staging a performance aiming at enargeia – was made. In the Quintilian notion ekphrasis performs that which it represents and the digital ekphrasis in computerized novels and electronic literature oscillates between inside – outside – inside. This could be further elaborated on with Derrida’s critique of the Kantian notion that a painting or sculpture can be subdivided into ergon and parerga - the workand its supplement (in the form of framing, drapery or other borders). Derrida writes in The Truth in Painting: “A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the done (fait), the fact, the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside” (1978:54) Digital Ekphrasis, its historical origins and philosophical development throughout the centuries, could serve as a means of exploring the innovation of digital technologies and word/image-relations in particular.
This is a blog on my postdoc-project about ekphrasis, literature and digital humanities. The project aims at rethinking the dynamic relationship between word and image with a special focus on how digital technology shapes, transforms and reconfigures literary representation. The significance of the rhetorical concept and genre of ekphrasis (the verbal representation of a visual representation) will be re-examined through contemporary print novels, where the digital has left its mark (i.e. through strategies that require digital processing, and through thematic and formal explorations of the digital), as well as through electronic literature (computer-programmed literature meant to be read on a screen).
Ekphrasis is an old rhetorical concept, but what is innovative is the way that the computerized novel and electronic literature emulate the spatial and visual qualities that literary ekphrastic texts have historically struggled to achieve. The computerized novels, such as for example Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) by Jonathan Safran Foer, combine pictures and words in an innovative way and they are, according to N. Katherine Hayles, imitating electronic textuality at the same time as they are intensifying specific traditions of print literature. On the other hand, in electronic literature and digital poetry the visual object can be described by voice and other sounds, as well as a text while they could be set in motion. Is it useful or even relevant to use the concept of ekphrasis, and what is the consequence when words approach the condition of visuality and movement and vice versa? Could it be that the traditional ekphrasis collapses when words, images, voice, sounds and movement are brought together, but that this dialogical displacement of positions instead gives birth to the digital ekphrasis.
Consequently, I will propose a theoretical frame-work for analysing ekphrasis in computerized novels and electronic literature. The traditional distinctions between visual and verbal media, such as G. E. Lessing describes them in Laokoön (1766), will here be described – with W.J.T. Mitchell and Mikhail Bakhtin’s as a configuration which stages a dialectical tension, or a semantic shift, that is geared towards the digital ekphrasis.
