The peculiarities of medial elements’ functioning in a painting ekphrasis

The paper seeks to fully analyze the intermedial correlations of poetry, painting, music, and dance in a literary description (aka ekphrasis) of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s picture The Peasant Dance. Ekphrasis, defined as a verbal description of an artwork in fiction and non-fiction, forms a large part of William Carlos Williams’ creative legacy. W.C. Williams (1883-1963) is a great American poet, novelist, essayist, playwright with many renowned literary awards including the posthumous Pulitzer Prize for the poetic cycle Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1963). The paper is based on the material of one of the cycle’s poems “The Dance” (1944). The ekphrastic poem under analysis is an allusion to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s picture The Peasant Dance. The author follows A. Hansen-Lowe’s typology of intermedial correlations which is still being clarified and expanded due to linguists’ continuing interest in the explication of intermedial correlations extending beyond those of literature and painting once introduced by Hansen-Lowe. The study draws on three common types of intermedial correlations among which are transposition, transfiguration, projection. The author establishes that the medial (painting, music, dance) elements are incorporated into the ekphrasis within transposition and transfiguration, and function on different language levels (phonetic, morphological, lexical-semantic, syntactic) as well as in the poem as a whole. The study reveals that such medial elements as ring composition clearly shaping the contours of the ekphrasis like a picture frame, allusions to Bruegel and his painting making up the plot of the poem, terms of music and dance and thematically related words are referred to as those which more explicitly demonstrate the dialogic relationship between the arts. The most complex intermedial correlations of the discursive nature lie on the content and figurative levels, and can be inferred from the analysis of epydigmatic ties and that of the trope system of the ekphrasis. The author assumes that the complex semiotic, semantic, and aesthetic mechanisms typical of the intermedial correlations of poetry, painting, music, and dance involve representations in different sensory modalities, contribute to imagery and expressiveness of the ekphrastic poem as well as create its overall tone and atmosphere which can be characterized as being carnival, grotesque and comic. The latter is represented by the medial elements serving compositional, plot-building, sense-forming and parody functions. On the basis of the results obtained the author concludes by arguing that it is a high degree of the incorporated medial elements that makes intermediality is both W.C. Williams’ writing strategy and the artistic dominant of the entire ekphrasis. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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