James Cisneros, Queen's University, Canada.

ekphrasis

« This is an old debate between specialists. Between what the poet masters and what escapes him. So Lessing’s rejection of ekphrasis attacks this other temporality. The division between time and space is almost a division between one kind of temporality which would be narrative temporality and another kind which is non-narrative temporality which is particular to objects. Lessing’s rejection of ekphrasis attacks this other temporality that resists the narrative drive. Narrative, after all, has the huge advantage of guiding the reader serving a didactic purpose that finally justifies the work on a social scale. »