The rhetoric of dilation: ekphrasis and ideology

Abstract

Abstract Ekphrasis is both a poetic device and a literary genre. In its broadest sense, ekphrasis involves the rhetorical description of a person, place, or thing, as for instance in the first recorded use of the term by Dionysus of Helicarnassus.1 For our purposes, however, ekphrasis may be defined more narrowly as the poetic description of a work of art, ‘the verbal representation’, as W. J. T. Mitchell has written, ‘of a visual representation’.2 The word derives from the Greek 'ekphassein' which suggests speaking out or expressing, and was employed in the fourth century by the sophist Callistratus as the title of a work describing fourteen statues. Ekphrasis also shares semantic affinities with 'ekphasis', a descriptive exercise; ‘ekphonesis’, an exclamation; and most interestingly, the noun ‘ecphractic’, a medical term referring to any purgative process.3