ABSTRACT
Ekphrasis, which is today mostly understood as a verbal representation that evokes a visual representation (Heffernan 1993), already existed in late Greco-Roman antiquity as a rhetorical mode of speaking to describe objects, people, places, and time. Surprisingly, ekphrases have not only survived into the digital age, which should have made verbal descriptions of easily accessible reproductions of artworks and other visual artifacts obsolete, but they are flourishing more than ever. This chapter discusses contemporary ekphrasis against this digital backdrop and does so by dedicating itself to a functional approach. Our argument is driven by the conviction that literature by nature is performative and hence has the potential to intervene not only in the aesthetic field but also in the broader cultural and sociopolitical spheres. With the help of three pertinent and highly acclaimed ekphrastic novels from the Anglophone context, we explore some of ekphrasis’ recent shapes and their functions. We address ekphrastically created complications of canon, aura, and aesthetic value in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018); discuss how ekphrasis is used in Olivia Laing’s memoir Lonely City (2016) to contest boundaries between disciplines, genres, and selves; and examine the ethical and cultural work of ekphrasis in climate change fictions such as James Bradley’s Clade (2015).
