Joycee on The Mona Lisa and the Poetics of Ekphrasis

O J Joycee (Research Scholar) has posted The Smile that Launched a Thousand Lines: The Mona Lisa and the Poetics of Ekphrasis on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Comparisons between the visual and verbal arts and the barrier between poetry and painting have long been a source of theoretical debate and have generated a large body of critical discussion. It is believed that the discussions about ekphrasis do not lay sufficient emphasis on the poet-reader/viewer/spectator, and the reader of the poem as a spectator or the ekphrasic spectator. Most writers frequently overlook the role of modern critical theories like Reader response and Spectator response in the analyses of ekphrastic poems. The spectator is either clubbed with the reader with a slanting bar (reader/spectator) implying no difference between the two or is assigned a passive role compared with the reader's.

The reader of an ekphrasic poem is also a spectator. Being a spectator involves reading poems, which, in fact, are reading paintings or sculptures. In this context, the reader is therefore different from an ordinary reader, for he is both a reader and a spectator. The inter-art text within the text, studied from this angle, unfolds the plurality of meaning as well as different aspects of culture, race, gender and so on.

This paper examines the poems written on one art object, The Mona Lisa, the western icon of art and beauty. The poems chosen are those of Yeats, Angelina Weld Grimke and John Stone.