“Beim Straucheln und beim Stürzen und beim Schreien”

In this analysis of Gert Hofmann's 1985 novel, Der Blindensturz , ekphrasis is reexamined as a postmodern literary device through which marginalized characters express their alterity Here, the traditional ekphrastic focus on a work of plastic art within a text shifts instead to the literary subjects illuminated by an artwork. The relationship of the subjects (six blind beggars) to the painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and the way in which he represents them in the 1568 painting, Parable of the Blind , inspire questions of both ethics and aesthetics. Conventional theories of intersemiotic transposition underpin this investigation; however, it will be shown that both Hofmann and Bruegel simultaneously confirm and challenge tradition. I argue that while the painter's transformation of the marginalized characters into visual signs converts them into a form of representation legible to the public, the act of ekphrastic narration gives voice to this signification

Aesthetics · Alterity · Art · Art history · Comics · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Painting · Postmodernism · Representation (politics) · Art, Aesthetics, and Perception · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• Museum of words

  James A W Heffernan•Museum of words•1993

  Add to list