This investigation undertakes to re-centre the figure of the film star and their film appearances in the field of star study. To this end it uses Charlton Heston as its focus in a re-appraisal of existing methods of accounting for the star phenomenon in cinema. It also concomitantly re-assesses existing accounts of the significance of Charlton Heston as a film star. This thesis posits a robust method for identifying the specificities of the star’s contribution to a film’s meanings and effects across the body of their work by drawing on Andrew Britton’s understanding of the ‘star enactment’. Present approaches through which to engage with the details of a star’s performance are considered in detail and the weaknesses of those that seek to impose external schemas onto such discussions are highlighted. The difficulties with approaches that attempt to account for the star as a signifying phenomenon through the concepts of acting and performance are also considered. Existing methods which may allow for a fruitful investigation into the significance of the star enactment, such as the commutation test, are re- formulated in this study and their benefits are demonstrated through their application to key Heston star enactments. These new understandings are also made possible through the application of an ‘ekphrastic’ method of rendering film moments. Previous readings of Heston’s star figure are also re- appraised, and their conclusions questioned, through closer reference to the evidence of details from films. The fruitfulness of this method for analysing and commenting on film is thus demonstrated and Heston’s relationship to genre and its effect on performance style is also considered in order to be able to confidently assert the specific features of the Heston aesthetic.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the development of technologies for externalizing human memory beyond writing, painting, and sculpting. These modes of visual representation, namely photography and cinema carried with them a purported objective representation of reality, which has been used to create classifications, divide people groups, and construct grand historical narratives used to marginalize those that do not fit within the hegemonic center. Looking to the works of writer W.G. Sebald, and filmmaker Chris Marker, we see a complication of the divide between visual and verbal texts, as each artist deconstructs their own medium’s conventions. Using theories of ekphrasis to draw connections between verbal and visual representation, we see how Sebald and Marker explore notions of memory, identity, and history as they struggle with the impossibility of representing the great traumas of the twentieth century.

There are multiple ways in which language and image share one another’s aesthetic message, such as traditional ekphrasis, which uses language to describe a work of art, or notional ekphrasis, which involves literature describing something that can be considered a work of art but does not physically exist at the time the description is written. However, these two terms are not inclusive to all artworks depicting literature or literature depicting artworks. Several scenes and characters from literature have been appropriated in art and the numerous paintings of Ophelia’s death as described by Gertrude in Hamlet, specifically Millais’ Ophelia, is the focus of this project. Throughout this thesis I analyze Gertrude’s account in three sections—the landscape, the body, and the voice—and compare it to its transmutation on the canvas.

This dissertation explores how literary descriptions of visual artworks affect the narrative and descriptive fabric of a text. The novels I examine operate on three textual levels: the painter's creative struggles, his amorous entanglements with his model and/or the painted women of his canvas, and his aesthetic claims to revolutionize painting. My project argues that ekphrasis is a translational mode that takes two forms: the traditional, "contained" description of a visual artwork; and a mode of writing that pervades the entire text and emulates the characteristics of painting. For example, Balzac's "Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu" and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon successfully adopt the ekphrastic mode of writing, transforming the narrative into a canvas where the boundaries between the media are blurred. On the other hand, Zola's L'oeuvre exploits ekphrasis in order to advance the superiority of literature over painting. At the heart of these Realist and Naturalist texts, the fundamental adherence to the mimetic principle of art is confronted with the nonfigurative experiments of their fictional painters. The female body, as the embodiment of Art and the manifestation of the artist's desire, becomes the symptom of his incursion into abstract painting and the site of the resistance to ekphrasis.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1992. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 236-258).

What can the study of Victorian literature gain from approaching primary texts explicitly as processing, storing, and transmitting data? I suggest that, by applying tools and methodologies from German media history that are usually reserved for technical and digital media, we can illuminate how individual texts operate and better understand Victorian texts as media, which remains an underdeveloped aspect of materialist literary study. In analysing how Victorian texts depict encounters with traditional plastic art-objects, I develop new applications of Friedrich Kittler’s ideas of recursion and transposition, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s method of reading for Stimmung, and the theory of cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken). I also propose new concepts to further our understanding of how encounters with art-objects function, such as the observer effect: the simultaneous perception of past and future meanings of an art-object. Close readings of Michael Field’s Sight and Song and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets suggest that both volumes acknowledge encounter as a cultural technique, rather than a spontaneous, independent action by the subject. Yet they propose different roles for themselves within that technique. Michael Field’s poems purport to halt the process of recursion, but Rossetti’s demand that readers experience their own observer effects. Meanwhile, Vernon Lee’s Hauntings: Fantastic Stories and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray demonstrate the agency of art-objects vis-à-vis the cultural technique of encounter. Lee’s stories reveal the threat to an individual subject’s production of future meanings that art-objects pose, in particular through their effects of presence. In Dorian Gray, the art-object’s own data processing circumscribes the subject’s observer effect. Each text thus evidences its operations as a medium and its complicated relationships with other media in the form of art-objects. Each processes data; recurs to art-objects, tropes, or themes and transmits future meanings thereof; and participates in the cultural technique of encounter. In so doing, these texts resisted the threats of marginalisation that faced ‘old media’ from the rise of photography and the incipient development of film at the fin de siècle.

Submitted by Rômulo Titton Dezen (romulomil@uol.com.br) on 2018-05-04T18:03:39Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Estudo dos dispositivos retoricos em La Promenade Vermet, de Denis Diderot (versão final).pdf: 2806066 bytes, checksum: 0f23235533bff1d0bcbb52aef76d8f7a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Elza Mitiko Sato null (elzasato@ibilce.unesp.br) on 2018-05-04T21:21:15Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 dezen_rt_me_sjrp_int.pdf: 2806066 bytes, checksum: 0f23235533bff1d0bcbb52aef76d8f7a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-05-04T21:21:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 dezen_rt_me_sjrp_int.pdf: 2806066 bytes, checksum: 0f23235533bff1d0bcbb52aef76d8f7a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-03-23 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Denis Diderot, auteur d'une oeuvre vaste et pluridimensionnelle, est une personnalité très reconnue et importante aux Sciences Humaines. La Promenade Vernet, partie intégrante du Salon de 1767, reflète bien la complexité de l'oeuvre du philosophe dans son intégralité car on peut observer des traits caractéristiques à plusieurs genres de texte tel que la fiction, l'essai et la critique. Le court texte est une « promenade » dans laquelle Diderot décrit avec maîtrise une série de sept « sites » sous prétexte de mettre en cause diverses sujets de nature philosophique et esthétique. Ce que le lecteur n'a pas d'accès — et arrive à apprendre seulement à la fin — est au fait que les descriptions des éléments des paysages ne font pas référence à sept campagnes, mais à sept tableaux d'un célèbre paysagiste français, Joseph Vernet. Pendant la « Promenade », Diderot et l'abbé, son interlocuteur et personnage fictif, débattent, dramatiquement, en longues journées, les convictions quant à l'art, à la position de l'homme dans le monde et aux moeurs. Cette recherche vise mettre en évidence les dispositifs rhétoriques utilisés par l'auteur, spécialement l'ekphrasis et le hiéroglyphe, tous les deux associés, directe ou indirectement, au rapport entre le verbal et l'imagerie (ut pictura poesis). Pour le développement de la recherche, des auteurs des époques variés sont utilisés, tel que Horace (18 a.C.), qui a inventé le terme ut pictura poesis ; Lessing (1768), qui a été fondamental au développement de la rhétorique ; et Lichtenstein (1994), dont l'oeuvre trace un parcours approfondi de l'histoire de la rhétorique visuelle et sur laquelle ce mémoire se base avec un certain accent. Dans le texte de Diderot, on remarque une importance significative de références classiques, ainsi, des articles qui éclairent-ils l'oeuvre de Diderot par ce point de vue ont été choisis pour constituer la recherche. À part cet apparat théorique, il est fait appel à textes composant l'oeuvre de Diderot qui ne font pas partie du Salon de 1767, ainsi que la Lettre sur les sourds et muets à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent, dans laquelle on trouve l'expression « hiéroglyphe » pour la première fois. En plus des textes du critique philosophe, on se sert d'une riche fortune critique et essentiellement française qui s'applique à l'étude de l'oeuvre de Diderot, y compris Bukdahl (1980), Chouillet (1987), Starobinski (1991) et Delon (1995). Dans ce travail il est aussi possible de trouver une certaine exploration de l'esthétique et de la peinture, compte tenu de la nature plurielle du texte qui a été objet d'étude. Après cette recherche, on peut avoir une compréhension plus importante des rapports établis entre le visuel et l'écrit. Finalement, et par conséquence, l'examen de cet auteur et de son texte met en lumière ce qui a été les Salons, genre littéraire créé au XVIIIème siècle, qui, malgré sa courte duration (n'a survécu que pendant un siècle), a provoqué des importants dédoublements vers l'art et la littérature modernes. / Denis Diderot, autor de uma obra vasta e multifacetada, é tido como uma personalidade muito importante para as ciências humanas. La Promenade Vernet, trecho integrante do Salão de 1767, reflete bem a complexidade da obra do filósofo como um todo, pois é nele em que se observam traços de diferentes gêneros como ficção, ensaio e crítica. Esse curto texto é um “passeio” em que Diderot descreve com maestria uma série de sete “sítios”, com o pretexto de discutir diversas questões de natureza filosófica e estética. O que o leitor não sabe — e só vem a saber no final — é que as descrições dos elementos das paisagens não fazem referência a sete campanhas, mas sim a sete quadros de um famoso paisagista francês, Joseph Vernet. No “Passeio”, Diderot e o Abade, seu interlocutor e personagem fictício, discutem, dialogicamente, em longas jornadas, sobre suas convicções quanto à arte, ao lugar do homem no mundo e a questões morais. Esta pesquisa visa colocar em foco os dispositivos retóricos utilizados pelo autor, especialmente a ekphrasis e o hieróglifo, ambos associados, direta ou indiretamente, à relação entre o verbal e o imagético (ut pictura poesis). Para o desenvolvimento da pesquisa, são utilizados autores de variadas épocas, como Horácio (18 a.C.), que cunhou o termo ut pictura poesis; Lessing (1768), que foi determinante para o desenvolvimento da retórica; e Lichtenstein (1994), cuja obra traça um percurso aprofundado da história da retórica pictórica e na qual esta dissertação se apoia com certo destaque. No texto de Diderot, nota-se significativa importância de referências clássicas, portanto, alguns artigos que esclarecem a obra de Diderot por esse olhar também foram elencados para a constituição da pesquisa. Além desse aparato teórico, recorre-se a alguns textos da obra de Diderot que não são especificamente o Salão de 1767, como a Carta para os surdos-mudos ao uso daqueles que ouvem e falam, no qual o termo “hieróglifo” aparece pela primeira vez. Junto a textos do crítico-filósofo, faz-se uso de uma fortuna crítica rica e predominantemente francesa que se aplica ao estudo da obra diderotiana, entre eles Bukdahl (1980), Chouillet (1987), Starobinski (1991) e Delon (1995). Neste trabalho também é possível encontrar algum aprofundamento sobre estética e sobre a pintura, dada a natureza plural do texto que foi objeto de estudo. Há, a partir desta pesquisa, uma maior compreensão das relações estabelecidas entre o visual e o escrito. Finalmente, e por consequência, o exame desse autor e de seu texto traz à luz um pouco do que foram os Salões, gênero literário criado no século XVIII que, embora tenha sido de curta duração (sobreviveu por cerca de um século, apenas), teve desdobramentos importantes para a arte e a literatura modernas. / Denis Diderot, the author of a vast and multidimensional work, is a renowned personality to the Human Sciences. Promenade Vernet, an integral part of the 1767 Salon, reflects the complexity of the work of the philosopher in its entirety as we can observe some traces of genres such as fiction, essay, and criticism. The short text is a "walk" in which Diderot masterfully describes a series of seven "sites" under the pretext of questioning various subjects of a philosophical and aesthetic nature. What the reader does not have access to - and only learns at the end - is that descriptions of landscape elements do not refer to seven campaigns, but to seven paintings by the famous French landscape artist, Joseph Vernet. During the "Walk", Diderot and the abbé, his interlocutor and fictitious character, discuss dramatically, in long journeys, the beliefs about art, the position of man in the world and morality. This research aims to highlight the rhetorical devices used by the author, especially ekphrasis and hieroglyph, both associated, directly or indirectly, with the relationship between verbal and imagery (ut pictura poesis). For the development of the research, authors from different periods are used, such as Horace (18 b.C.), who coined the term ut pictura poesis; Lessing (1768), which was fundamental to the development of rhetoric; and Lichtenstein (1994), whose work traces an in-depth journey into the history of rhetoric of figures and on which this memoir is based with a certain accent. In Diderot's text, we note a significant importance of classical texts in other that articles that enlighten this perspective in Diderot’s work were chosen to constitute the research. Apart from this theoretical apparatus, it is appealed to texts composing the work of Diderot which are not part of the 1767 Salon, as well as the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, for the Use of those who hear and speak, in which we find the expression "hieroglyph" for the first time. In addition to the texts of the critic philosopher, we use a rich critical and essentially French fortune that applies to the study of the work of Diderot, including Bukdahl (1980), Chouillet (1987), Starobinski (1991) and Delon (1995). In this work is also possible to find some exploration of aesthetics and painting, given the plural nature of the text that has been object of study. After this research, one can have a further understanding of the relationships between the visual and the written. Finally, and therefore, the examination of this author and his text highlights what the Salons was, a literary genre created in the eighteenth century, which has caused significant duplication towards modern art and literature despite its one-century duration.

Cette thèse se propose de définir l'ékphrasis performée, de la théoriser et de montrer son applicabilité concrète aux études théâtrales. Il s'agit d'un syntagme par lequel nous désignons le point de rencontre entre les possibilités rhétoriques de l'ékphrasis et les moyens du performatif. Cependant, l'ékphrasis ne se réduit guère à une intention purement mimétique, mais elle est toujours l'expression d'un regard aussi distancié que partiel sur le monde. À partir de la théorisation qu'on a réalisée de l'ékphrasis performée, on a élaboré quelques instruments d'analyse dont l'objectif est de comprendre certains aspects de la construction de l'image sur scène, de son utilisation dans le théâtre en général et dans le théâtre contemporain en particulier. La deuxième et la troisième parties de la thèse présentent ensuite deux parcours de recherchedifférentes. Ainsi la deuxième partie est dédiée à l'oeuvre de Samuel Beckett, tandis que la troisième est dédiée au théâtre de Anagoor. Ces deux parties se présentent comme une forme d'application des principes de l'ékphrasis performée. / The aim of this thesis is to develop a theory of performed ékphrasis. This rhetoric figure, generally studied in comparatives studies between literature and visual arts, holds a performative potential. From theory, I have extracted relevant rhetoric tools for an understanding of some aspects of image building on (also contemporary) theatre action. Ékphrasis doesn’t just reply to a mimetic intention but it always returns a partial sight on reality. Following this performed ékphrasis perspective I havefocused on Samuel Beckett’s work and Anagoor’s contemporary performances. / La presente tesi di dottorato si propone di elaborare una teoria dell'ékphrasis performata. L'ékphrasis, categoria retorica normalmente trattata in studi comparativi tra letteratura e arti visuali, ha in sé un potenziale performativo che viene qui dimostrato. In seguito, dalla teoria, sono stati estratti degli strumenti di analisi per la comprensione di alcuni aspetti della costruzione dell'immagine in scena, del suo utilizzo nel teatro in generale e nel teatro contemporaneo in particolare. Poiché si tratta di una tecnica di slittamento tra generi e oggetti di natura diversa, che agisce con operazioni di montaggio e rimontaggio delle immagini (per via discorsiva o visiva), l'ékphrasis non risponde mai a un'intenzione puramente mimetica, ma restituisce sempre uno sguardo parziale sul mondo. In quest'orizzonte si presenta l'approfondimento di due casi emblematici per una concreta dimostrazione dei meccanismi di funzionamento dell'ékphrasis performata: l'opera Samuel Beckett e i lavori della compagnia italiana contemporanea Anagoor.

Poems to the Sea: Rather than narrating or describing a work of visual art, the poems that form this collection show an accumulation, juxtaposition and realignment of material ranging from art historical detail and critique to a more personal, location specific response to works viewed in galleries and museums. Many of the poems engage with non-representational artworks and question how best to reflect, translate or expand upon their transformative effects. The first section, ‘Museum Notes’, explores Charles Olson’s open field poetics by giving artists and writers a conversational voice. ‘Sound Fields’, the second section, responds to individual works of art and reflects a systems-based approach. The authorial voice within ‘Poems to the Sea’, the third section, is that of an artist involved in making a series of palimpsest drawings to capture a sense of place as drawing and writing overlaps and intertwines. Painterly Poetics: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Cole Swensen: This thesis explores three American poets from successive generations to examine three related types of engagement with visual art. As literary models that have informed my own poetic practice, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Cole Swensen have theorized their own writing process to consider ways of using language to enhance the transmission and transcription of their visual stimuli and ideas. All three are interested in visual art as a model for the writing process: as a means of seeing, thinking and perceiving. After an introduction that surveys relations between verbal and visual art, a chapter is devoted to each of the three poets. In the opening and longest chapter, examples of Olson’s writing are compared to the approach of several Abstract Expressionist painters who contributed to the culture of experimentation and spontaneity that emerged under Olson’s leadership at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s. Following a discussion of Olson as a uniquely influential figure, the chapter on Creeley considers the role of visual art in his poetics. Swensen’s writing is subsequently explored for its extension of the Black Mountain legacy: how she builds upon established critical methods to achieve what she calls ‘a side-by-side, walking-along-with’ relationship between the poem and the artwork.

In this study the theoretical notion of ekphrasis is analyzed in three novels by Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999). Tropismes from 1939 is studied in the light of Ruth Webb’s analysis of ekphrasis as a rhetorical device used to persuade an audience in Antiquity. The study reveals several equivalents with the ancient notions of the rhetorical ekphrasis. In Entre la vie et la mort from 1968, we have found an expression of the tension described by Murray Krieger as fundamental to ekphrasis and consisting of the two opposing incentives of exhilaration and exasperation. Sarraute creates a constant textual oscillation between the two oppositional beliefs, and she leaves the question open were Krieger claims the incapacity of language. A tension continues to underlie the text in Ici from 1995. Audet and Marcotte (2012) define a tension between the one and the multiple expressed through the combination of narrative and poetic discourse. We have found an equivalent to this perspective in the theoretical framework elaborated by Tamar Yacobi, adding the concepts of narrative ekphrasis, the pictorial model and the generalized reference. The motivations and mechanisms of the generalized reference are compared to the discussion in Sarraute’s text. We find that Sarraute’s text adds several observations to the theory of Yacobi. Our conclusion is that the theoretical field of ekphrasis seems to be able to add a new dimension of observations when studying the work of Sarraute, but that more studies need to be done in order to find intersubjective affirmation considering the interpretative foundations of our method.