76 TRANSILVANIA 11-12/2019 A Teoretical Perspective on Ekphrasis Daria PÂRVU Universitatea „Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu, Facultatea de Litere și Arte “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Faculty of Letters and Arts Personal e-mail: daria.parvu@ulbsibiu.ro Several issues have been raised based on the pervasiveness of the narrative into the ekphrastic poem: Krieger, on the one hand, considers that ekphrastic poetry is related to freezing the temporal dimension into space, whereas Wendy Steiner, in her study on Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (1988), contends that ekphrasis is the verbal equivalent of the “pregnant moment” in art (13- 14). What she understands by the pregnant moment in visual art is the stillness of a point which implies what comes before that moment and what is to follow it. Hefernan departs completely from these views by upholding the idea that ekphrasis is dynamic and that the narrative vein is taken from the pregnant moment of visual art which is in such a way processed as to “deliver from the pregnant moment of visual art its embryonic narrative impulse.” Tat is why he refers to ekphrasis as being “dynamic” and “obstetric” (Hefernan 1993: 5). Hefernan feels compelled to give further explanations to justify his point of view according to which he does not support the idea that a picture cannot tell a story or that pictures difer tremendously from texts in that texts tell more comprehensive stories and paintings do not. His point of interest is not related to what pictures can or cannot do but rather what ekphrasis does with visual art. In order to support this point of view he gives the example of Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan” in which such a text does not tell a self-sufcient story, and Gainsborough’s painting Two Shepherd Boys Fighting, where the painting tells a self- sufcient story. A more nuanced explanation given to the narrative power of ekphrasis is provided by Gerard Genette, who considers ekphrasis to be more a description than a narration. He defnes narration as a depiction of people and objects in movement, whereas description is based on depicting people and objects standing still. Ekphrasis therefore falls into the category of description rather than narration, as it depicts fxed forms and objects. Moreover, Genette considers that narration is time-oriented whereas description suspends time, it is space-oriented and thus, he contends, it serves as “a mere auxiliary of narrative,” as “the ever-necessary, ever-submissive, never- emancipated slave” (Genette 1982: 136, 134). Hefernan domesticates the theory propounded by Genette in stating that ekphrasis is not submissive at all but, on the contrary, it is “the unruly antagonist of narrative, the ornamental digression that refuses to be merely ornamental” (Hefernan 1993: 5). If we A Teoretical Perspective on Ekphrasis Te paper explores the most dominant theoretical approaches concerning ekphrasis, emphasizing the progress made over the centuries in refning the concept and pointing out the achievements and the limitations in ekphrastic theory. Keywords: poetry, painting, ekphrasis, power of narration, power of resistance