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Ekphrasis and the religious impulse ...

Toronto, Amanda Ryan.

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Ekphrasis and the religious impulse in late-twentieth-century American fiction.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Ekphrasis and the religious impulse in late-twentieth-century American fiction./
Author:	Toronto, Amanda Ryan.
Description:	247 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4682.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International70-12A.
Subject:	American literature. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3380251
ISBN:	9781109505658

Ekphrasis and the religious impulse in late-twentieth-century American fiction.
Toronto, Amanda Ryan.

Ekphrasis and the religious impulse in late-twentieth-century American fiction. - 247 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4682.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2009.

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

This dissertation examines the use of ekphrasis in four late-twentieth-century American novels. I argue that ekphrasis allows the sacred and the secular to come together and allows the authors to explore religious impulses or experiences otherwise lost, muted or suppressed. Ekphrasis is a device that calls attention to representation, temporality and spatiality and is effective in revealing the instability of otherwise stable categories, such as the sacred and the secular, the visual and the verbal, and silence and voice. Religion is a major topic in each of the novels analyzed---Don DeLillo's Underworld, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. The presence of ekphrastic representation indicates that a text is struggling with competing cultural viewpoints. Religious belief is not presented as a sign of otherness; instead, I argue, the use of ekphrasis facilitates a more nuanced, complicated and conflicted approach towards religion in depictions of contemporary American society. What needs to be overcome in these novels are the beliefs that religion has no place in a secular society and that secular society is unable to complement a religious life. In their depictions of different artistic forms---site-specific art in the Southwest desert, photography, nineteenth-century landscape painting, and Navaho sand paintings---these novels struggle to strike a balance between the broadly metaphorical definitions of ekphrasis and the more literal, though equally complicated, definition of ekphrasis as a verbal representation of a visual object, in order to explore the concrete and spiritual functions of imagery itself.

ISBN: 9781109505658Subjects--Topical Terms:

523234
American literature.

Ekphrasis and the religious impulse in late-twentieth-century American fiction.
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245 1 0 $a Ekphrasis and the religious impulse in late-twentieth-century American fiction.
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500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4682.
500 $a Adviser: Cyrus R.K. Patell.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2009.
506 $a This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
520 $a This dissertation examines the use of ekphrasis in four late-twentieth-century American novels. I argue that ekphrasis allows the sacred and the secular to come together and allows the authors to explore religious impulses or experiences otherwise lost, muted or suppressed. Ekphrasis is a device that calls attention to representation, temporality and spatiality and is effective in revealing the instability of otherwise stable categories, such as the sacred and the secular, the visual and the verbal, and silence and voice. Religion is a major topic in each of the novels analyzed---Don DeLillo's Underworld, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. The presence of ekphrastic representation indicates that a text is struggling with competing cultural viewpoints. Religious belief is not presented as a sign of otherness; instead, I argue, the use of ekphrasis facilitates a more nuanced, complicated and conflicted approach towards religion in depictions of contemporary American society. What needs to be overcome in these novels are the beliefs that religion has no place in a secular society and that secular society is unable to complement a religious life. In their depictions of different artistic forms---site-specific art in the Southwest desert, photography, nineteenth-century landscape painting, and Navaho sand paintings---these novels struggle to strike a balance between the broadly metaphorical definitions of ekphrasis and the more literal, though equally complicated, definition of ekphrasis as a verbal representation of a visual object, in order to explore the concrete and spiritual functions of imagery itself.
520 $a The use of ekphrasis is an act that is bound up in the hope that a concrete, visible image can be conjured with words. Though the ekphrastic representations in these novels do reveal the struggle between competing categories, they tend to reveal a desire for sameness or symbiosis. Ekphrasis opens up a space for conversation between the sacred and the secular by revealing the instability and fluidity inherent in categories thought to be fixed and stable.
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