A Study Of Ekphrasis’ Cross-Media Narrative

Ekphrasis,as an ancient rhetorical term,has a long history in the world of western art and literature.Ekphrasis was initially used as a rhetorical technique;today’s ekphrasis is regarded as the verbal writing of visual artworks,even could be seen as a literary genre.The evolution of the meaning of ekphrasis,not only shows the inclusive attitude of contemporary scholars towards this term,but also presents the theoretical potential of ekphrasis.In the past two decades,intermedia studies have occupied a very important position in the field of literature and art.One of the most productive areas of transmedia research is crossmedia narrative.Ekphrasis has become a fascinating research topic in the intermedia field because it contains the representation and imitation of images by words,However,the communicative medium of ekphrasis is a temporal narrative medium(language),the literary narrativity brought by language cannot be ignored while paying attention to the intermediality of ekphrasis.Further,literary narrativity brought by language is the ekphrasis’ basic characteristic of its medium,while ekphrasis’ visual spatiality represents that ekphrasis transcends the limitation of its communicative medium to pursue the aesthetic effect of spacial communicative medium(image).In this way,ekphrasis that is based on literary narrativity and beyond it to represent visual spatiality could be regarded as a kind of cross-media narrative,which is the embodiment of an artistic phenomenon-“Anderstreben”.The process of ekphrasis’ cross-media narrative,on the one hand,contains the representation and imitation of visual images from images to words;on the other hand,means that ekphrasis transcends its medium limitation to pursue the aesthetic effect of the spatial medium.One verbal work could represent one single image or multiple images,both of which have the capability to produce the “mental image” pursued by ekphrasis.In this way,ekphrasis’ cross-media narrative could be divided into the cross-media narrative of one single image and the cross-media narrative of multiple images.These two types of narrative are not uncommon in specific ekphrasic text,however,in the study of ekphrasis,the latter one is usually overlooked.American narratologist Tamal Jacobi believes that the reason for the phenomenon of uneven focus lies in the critical preference for the traditional western mimesis principle,that is,strict mimesis in the study of ekphrasis.This paper takes ekphrasis that satisfy both it ancient and modern meaning as the research object;conducts it from the perspective of cross-media narrative.The introduction includes a review of previous studies,the value and significance of the study,and the main content and methods of the study.The paper includes three main parts,respectively discussing,analyzing,and elucidating the meaning evolution of ekphrasis,the cross-media narrative characteristics of ekphrasis,the cross-media narrative type,and the critical preference of ekphrasis.While clarifying the evolution of meaning,this paper aims to further explore the new possibilities of the study of ekphrasis in the cross-media narrative context.