Point of view in ekphrasis. Three poems by A. Kushner

Abstract

The paper analyses three ekphrasis-poems by Alexander Kushner: “El Greco. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz”, “Pieter de Hooch leaves the gate open…” and “The Night Watch”. The relevance of the article is determined by the relevance of the concept of ekphrasis in modern Philology and by the large number of theoretical and practical studies on this topic. Its novelty is determined by the lack of a comparative analysis of the above poems by A. Kushner and the insufficient knowledge of the relationship between the ekphrasis poetics and the point of view of the lyrical subject. Thus the main purpose of the paper is to investigate the relationship between the structure and poetics of ekfrasis, on the one hand, and the point of view of the lyrical subject, on the other. The author considers ekfrasis as a kind of description and one of the aspects of visual representation in literature, which she also considers as an aspect of the poetics of verbal text. Therefore, the central category for the analysis of ekphrasis in lyrics is the category of the lyrical subject, as a carrier of the speech and point of view in a lyric poem. The type of vision of the lyrical subject – direct, transgressive, or a combination of the two – is associated with the type of boundaries between the world of the picture and the world of the viewer, as well as with the structure of the ekphrastic description in A. Kushner’s poems.