ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the work of certain spectres in Denis Diderot's Salons, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and Gilles Deleuze's Francis Bacon, logique de la sensation. The writing of art criticism is, for a poet like Gautier, little more than a pretext for a 'flexing of linguistic muscles' that produces a performance which leaves the painted image for dead. Indeed, for Scott, the ekphrastic text is particularly brutal in its treatment of the image: a mark of Gautier's creativity is his ability to 'virtually obliterate' in writing the painting to which his text might otherwise be taken to refer. According to Murray Krieger, on at least one understanding of the workings of ekphrasis, it is 'an epigram without the accompanying object, indeed without any object except the one it would verbally create'.
