Student Work

Ekphrasis is the act of describing or translating a piece of art from one medium to another. In other words, ekphrasis is relational. It is often used to describe one form of art, such as painting or sculpture, with another form of art, such as poetry or prose. But it can be as simple as taking a photograph of a sculpture.  In the American literary tradition Lydia Sigourney’s Powers’s Greek Slave is a classic example of ekphrasis. In this poem, Sigourney describes the experience of viewing Hiram Powers’s wildly popular sculpture The Greek Slave.

While we won’t be writing poetry to describe a piece of art in the course, we will be doing our own version of ekphrasis writing by finding connections between two mediums: the verbal and the visual. But instead of starting with the visual, as most ekphrasis writing does, we’re starting from the verbal, that is, with the works of literature we’ll encounter throughout the course.  We’ll be starting with Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and, as we progress through the course we’ll continue to add new ekphrasis writing to subsequent texts. Click on the titles to see individual student responses.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817)

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847)

Elizabeth Stoddard’s  The Morgesons (1862)

Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)

F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby (1925)

Carson McCullers’s  The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto (2001)

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