The Making and Unmaking of Visual History : Ekphrasis and Postmodern Historiographic Discourse in Graham Swift's Out of this World and Last Orders
Kytökangas, Jonna (2024-11-12)
The Making and Unmaking of Visual History : Ekphrasis and Postmodern Historiographic Discourse in Graham Swift's Out of this World and Last Orders
(12.11.2024)
Julkaisu on tekijänoikeussäännösten alainen. Teosta voi lukea ja tulostaa henkilökohtaista käyttöä varten. Käyttö kaupallisiin tarkoituksiin on kielletty.
avoin
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on:
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe20241212101903
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe20241212101903
Tiivistelmä
In my thesis, I examine and compare British author Graham Swift’s novels Out of this World (1988) and Last Orders (1996). The comparison focuses on how the novels employ ekphrasis. Ekphrasis in literary theory refers to the verbal representation of the visual, such as artworks and architecture. I maintain that such representations are consequential either in terms of the novel’s story or its thematic contribution.
I study ekphrasis in connection with visual history, especially. Both novels conduct discursive historical inquiries; Out of this World extensively discusses war photographs, and Last Orders has its characters encounter two historical landmarks, a war memorial and a cathedral. A particularly pervading theme in the novels is the Second World War as a phenomenon of history, and I use theories on second-generation postmemory and postwar memorial culture to investigate the ekphrases as materialisations of this phenomenon.
Moreover, both novels doubt the representational abilities of, for example, photographs and memorials, and ultimately subvert the notion that the viewer can attain knowledge or stable meanings from them. This discourse reflects postmodern historicism which centres on scepticism about historical knowledge and argues that history and fiction are written by the same narrative conventions. I refer to Linda Hutcheon’s theory (1988) on historiographic metafiction to point out that Out of this World, especially, uses ekphrasis together with a controlling narrator to highlight the ways in which history is mediated to the present as a kind of fiction-writing.
The comparative analysis shows that Out of this World realises ekphrasis often descriptively to shock the reader with the photographic horrors of war, but, overall, the novel seeks to demonstrate that photographs can represent the past only arbitrarily and often under such ideological forces as propaganda. Ekphrasis is a discourse tool but affects the novel’s underlying storyline very little. Last Orders, in contrast, incorporates ekphrases as necessary encounters along the character-journeys it depicts. The encounters alter the course of the story, and the ekphrastic objects themselves, as they are viewed through multiple contrasting perspectives, function predominantly as sites for self-reflection.
I study ekphrasis in connection with visual history, especially. Both novels conduct discursive historical inquiries; Out of this World extensively discusses war photographs, and Last Orders has its characters encounter two historical landmarks, a war memorial and a cathedral. A particularly pervading theme in the novels is the Second World War as a phenomenon of history, and I use theories on second-generation postmemory and postwar memorial culture to investigate the ekphrases as materialisations of this phenomenon.
Moreover, both novels doubt the representational abilities of, for example, photographs and memorials, and ultimately subvert the notion that the viewer can attain knowledge or stable meanings from them. This discourse reflects postmodern historicism which centres on scepticism about historical knowledge and argues that history and fiction are written by the same narrative conventions. I refer to Linda Hutcheon’s theory (1988) on historiographic metafiction to point out that Out of this World, especially, uses ekphrasis together with a controlling narrator to highlight the ways in which history is mediated to the present as a kind of fiction-writing.
The comparative analysis shows that Out of this World realises ekphrasis often descriptively to shock the reader with the photographic horrors of war, but, overall, the novel seeks to demonstrate that photographs can represent the past only arbitrarily and often under such ideological forces as propaganda. Ekphrasis is a discourse tool but affects the novel’s underlying storyline very little. Last Orders, in contrast, incorporates ekphrases as necessary encounters along the character-journeys it depicts. The encounters alter the course of the story, and the ekphrastic objects themselves, as they are viewed through multiple contrasting perspectives, function predominantly as sites for self-reflection.