“EKPHRASIS THROUGH OTHERNESS:

THE TRANSFORMATION OF IMAGERY IN DEREK WALCOTT’S POETRY”

Leandro Zago

• Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:imagery, a rather vague critical term covering those uses of language in a literary work that evoke sense impressions by literal ‐or figurative reference to perceptible or ‘concrete’ objects, scenes, actions, or states, as distinct from the language of abstract argument or exposition. The imagery of a literary work thus comprises the set of images that it uses; these need not be mental ‘pictures’, but may appeal to senses other than sight. The term has often been applied particularly to the figurative language used in a work, especially to its metaphors and similes. Images suggesting further meanings and associations in ways that go beyond the fairly simple identifications of metaphor and simile are often called symbols. The critical emphasis on imagery in the mid 20th ‐century, both in New Criticism and in some influential studies of Shakespeare, tended to glorify the supposed concreteness of literary works by ignoring matters of structure, convention, and abstract argument: thus Shakespeare's plays were read as clusters or patterns of ‘thematic imagery’ according to the predominance of particular kinds of image (of animals, of disease, etc.), without reference to the action or to the dramatic meaning of characters' speeches. See also motif.

ImageryImagery

Imagery in postcolonial* poetry reading is usually aligned through the squint of cultural identity.

*Postcolonial studies in this investigation will be

restricted to the concept of otherness and the Caribbean culture.

Identifiable aspects of cultural identity, e.g., resembling physiological and moral generalizations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, class,

and nationality, may limit/restrain poetic imagery response construction in postcolonial poetry within the social realm only.

Pablo Picasso. Girl Before a Mirror. 1932. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Arts, New

York, NY, USA.

The overall context of the proposed investigation concerns ekphrasis, and otherness.

Holub (1984) pointed out: “The literary work is neither completely text nor completely the subjectivity of the reader, but a combination or merger of the two” (84).

Definition

Ekphrasis is a verbal representation of a visual representation through language of sense experience.

Otherness is a culturist trap.

http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/0415270618/pdf/theme2.pdf

The Specific Context The specific context of this investigation is

words generating images in Walcott’s collection of poems White Egrets.

“Who has removed the typewriter from my desk, so that I am a musician without his piano with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque as another spring? My veins bud, and I am sofull of poems, a wastebasket of black wire” (White Egrets 47).

Review of Literature Mitchell’s (1990) Iconology: Image, text, ideology; Ekphrasis

and the Other, Chicago U. P.

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (2000), Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts;

Hall, S. (1996) Who Needs Identity. Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: SAGE.

• ___. (1989). Ethnicity: Identity and Difference. Radical America.

Cheeken, Stephen. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis. Manchester U.P.; 1st edition (January 6, 2009);

ObjectivesThe overall objective of this investigation is an

ekphrastic literary analysis of the interrelation between imagery and words in poetry.

The specific objective is to investigate imagination (the manifestation of otherness in reading and understanding) tuning/aligning imagery in Walcott’s White Egrets.

Hypothesis• The hypothesis is that the images of the white

egrets, of Saint Lucia, and of Walcott himself seem to be portrayed as “pieces of a puzzle” put together as one, in that the concepts of imagery, ekphrasis, and otherness converge therein. Nevertheless, this apparent connection brought into oneness is also multiplicity through which identities may manifest in “each piece”.

“Let the torn poems sail from you like a flock/of white egrets in a long last sigh of relief/watch these egrets/stalk the lawn in a dishevelled troop, white banners/forlornly trailing their flags; they are the bleached regrets/of an old man's memoirs, their unwritten stanzas./ Pages gusting like wings on the lawn, wide open secrets" (65).

Significance of the Research

• The scientific significance of this research lies on the fact that reader’s response and visuality building imagery seem to be treated separately in the literary field.

• MA research at PGI contemplating Ekphrasis and Walcott.

• Personal.

PROCEDURES

• This is a theoretical research;• Identification and definition the main

hypothetical aspects which encompass this research;

• Annotated reading of the selected poems in the search of images and motifs.

PROBABLE CONTENTS

• Introduction;

• Chapter 2- “For an ekphrastic poetry”;

• Chapter 3: “The postcolonial camera: otherized distorted lens”;

• Conclusion.

REFERENCES• Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin. (2000). Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London and New York:

Routledge. • Baer, William. Conversations with Derek Walcott. University Press of Mississipi, 1996. USA.• Bosi, A. (1977). O ser e o tempo da poesia. São Paulo. Cultrix: Ed. Da Universidade de São Paulo.• Cheeken, Stephen. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis. Manchester U.P.; 1st edition (January 6,

2009). • Hall, S. (1996) Who Needs Identity. Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay.

London: SAGE. • ___. (1989). Ethnicity: Identity and Difference. Radical America: 23.4: 9-20. • Heffernan, James A. W. (2006). Cultivating picturacy: visual art and verbal interventions. Waco, Texas:

Baylor University Press. • Heffernan, James A. W. (1993). Museum of words: the poetics of ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. London:

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd.• Hollander, J. (1981). Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse. New York: Yale University Press.• Holub, Robert C. (1984) Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Methuen.• Kyle, K. (2009). Ezra Pound And The Rhetoric Of Science, 1901–1922. Howey University College London.

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in European Studies, University College London.

• Loizeaux, Elizabeth B. (2008). Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: University Press.• Meléndez, M. (2002). Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture

and Experience. (Co-editor). Bucknell: University Press.• Mitchell, W. J. T. (1990). Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Univ. Of Chicago Press.• Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994). Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Univ. Of Chicago

Press.• Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Ekphrasis and the Other, from PICTURE THEORY. The University of Chicago

Press.• Paz, Octavio. (2003). El Arco y La Lira. Fondo de Cultura Económica. México: D.F. • Said, Edward W. (1978). Orientalism. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Library. London: University College.• Walcott, Derek. (2010). White Egrets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

THANK YOU!