Abstract
In this interdisciplinary article, we apply the concept of the rhetorical figure of <i>ekphrasis</i>. We will show, in a first instance, that it can be understood as any type of description serving to bring to the reader’s eye something that is distant; however, with the passage of time, this rhetorical figure will be understood in a more complex way, that is, a type of description that targets only and exclusively artistic objects. This new conception will imply that <i>ekphrasis</i> will change from a simple figure that performs a “mimesis of nature” to a rhetorical figure that performs a “mimesis of culture”. Next, we will analyze poems by four poets (Theocritus, Greek, John Keats, English, Alberto de Oliveira, Brazilian and Wallace Stevens, American), each of whom describes a specific sculptural object, either a classical Greek urn, with ornaments or a common, bare jar. We show that there are modifications of the descriptive look, from a classical figuration, through the romantic, and the Parnassian, to the parodic, in the modernist or postmodernist conception, which, using a readymade, in Marcel Duchamp’s sense, deconstructs the relation between the artistic object, the poet and the reader, and thus implies the dismantling of the traditional convention of the rhetorical figure of <i>ekphrasis</i>.
Highlights
We will open this article with the conceptualization of the rhetorical figure of ekphrasis and its historical evolution, from its conception as a mere description to its more complex conception as a description of an object of the plastic arts
If we identify the ekphrasis with description pure and simple, we will verify that such identification, in a way, even if correct, will take from this rhetorical figure its specificity, as if it corresponded only to any type of enumeration of “people, events, moments, places, animals, plants”
We draw attention to the poem “Anedocte of the Jar” by Wallace Stevens (Reading, Pennsylvania, 1879 — Hartford, 1955), in which the ekphrastic description of a kind of vase, a jar, is noted: Anedocte of the Jar I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill
Summary
We will open this article with the conceptualization of the rhetorical figure of ekphrasis and its historical evolution, from its conception as a mere description to its more complex conception as a description of an object of the plastic arts. We will work with four ekphrastic pieces by Theocritus, Keats, Alberto de Oliveira, and Wallace Stevens, which share the theme of describing vases and the resonances that result from them
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