Ekphrasis between Antonia Sausan Byatt and Radwa Ashour : a comparative cultural study

Abstract EN

The research in hand aims at exploring ekphrastic writing as a literary phenomenon that appears in selected works of Antonia Susanne Byatt (1936) and Radwa Ashour (1946-2014).

The material of the research is "Medusa's Ankles" from Byatt's The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye from a book of short stories that carries the same title (1994), and Ashour's Heavier than Radwa (2013) and The Scream (2015).

The paper examines one example from each of the four works from a cultural perspective making use of theories relevant to cultural studies.

The theoretical aspect of the paper includes the exploration of the various definitions of ekphrasis, the types included in the paper in hand, and the various functions that they perform.

The examples that the paper uses as material for illustration and analysis are Byatt's ekphrastic writing about Matisse's "Rosy Nude" (1935) in "Medusa's Ankles", and her ekphrastic description of Haghia Sophia in "The Nightingale's Eye"; and Ashour's ekphrastic writing about Munch's "The Scream" (1893) and her description of the location of Orabi's house in Heavier than Radwa.

Due to the flexible aspect of descriptive exploration of several objects and aspects of things, the research relies on a number of analytical theories including cultural studies, semantics, semiotics, and reception theory.

The research comes to the conclusion that ekphrasis is a flexible literary tool that enables writers to free their creative abilities, and express their ideas and impressions in a creative and literally entertaining way.

It is also flexible in the sense that it has a variety of objects including works of art, architecture, and geographic space.

This rather adds to its depth of expression and makes cultural studies the best theoretical field that allows the best tools of exploration possible to this literary genre.