Picturing texts and reframing the visual arts: feminist modes of ekphrasis in The Matisse Stories, how to be both, and A Line Made By Walking

• Main Author: Khua, Kelly Janine Xiao Rong
• Other Authors: Geraldine Song
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Humanities::Language::English
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/172971
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Contemporary prose fiction is experiencing a pictorial turn as more writers integrate the visual arts into their works and continue the ekphrastic tradition. Though the literary mode has proliferated since Classical antiquity, much discussion of its usage is concentrated on poetry and scant attention has been directed towards its application in prose fiction. Drawing on ideas by W.J.T Mitchell, Elizabeth Loizeaux, and John Berger regarding ekphrasis and representations of women in the arts, this thesis examines the significance and narrative functions of ekphrasis through a comparative analysis of The Matisse Stories by A.S Byatt, How to be both by Ali Smith, and A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume. Close reading the three writers’ deployment of artworks into their texts reveals how they have developed novel ways to challenge conventions of ekphrasis that privilege the male gaze and relegate the image as a female Other. Overall, I argue that A.S Byatt, Ali Smith, and Sara Baume expand the limits of ekphrasis and adopt the literary mode as a strategy of resistance to counter antagonistic dualisms between word-image relations its associated dichotomies such as male/female, present/past and living/dead. By interweaving the visual arts into their narratives’ structural form and content, the three writers contest the authority of dominant historical narratives and modes of seeing.