Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Being the genre of the description (or the aesthetic reflection) the essential raw material of the historical-artistic reflection, with the present article it is tried to define and to value the contribution for the History of the Art of the literary figure of the ekphrasis (“ written description of visible objects”) and its position in today’s society, gathering different theories about the reconciliation between image-text. For this, the methodology of this study resides in a critical review of studies by leading experts in the field, such as W.J.T. Mitchell (1942) and Román de la Calle (1942). The ekphrasis had its starting point in the most remote origins of humanity, developing its foundations in the classical disciplines of Rhetoric, Sophistry and Poetics, which are the foundations of the Theory and Criticism of Art. But the ekphrasis phenomenon will reach its climax and greater complexity in Postmodernity or “Society of the Image”, where the domain of the image is extended to any area of life, against tradition, based on the text read or written (event called “pictorial turn” by W.J.T. Mitchell). Precisely, due to the proliferation and ambiguity of the visual in today’s society, the ekphrasis is put into question with numerous hypotheses faced around it, both in favor of the relationship between text and image and against its conciliation.