Ekphrasis as Scholarly-Imaginative Hybrid: A Workshop in Experimental Criticism with Rachel Eisendrath
Friday 13th June 2025.
Impression by Dr. Michal Zechariah.
Rachel Eisendrath’s workshop on ekphrasis as a scholarly-imaginative hybrid concluded this year’s series of Workshops in Experimental Criticism, and was run jointly as the latest Centre for Early Modern Studies Masterclass. These workshops have brought together scholars at all stages of their careers to try out and discuss creative alternatives to conventional academic writing. Trying to describe them makes me think of Marianne Moore’s famous poem. Academic Writing – ‘I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.’ Yet despite its problems, ‘one discovers that there is in / it after all, a place for the genuine.’ The fact that Moore’s judgment on poetry suddenly feels applicable to academic writing also mirrors Eisendrath’s emphasis on what creative and scholarly work have in common. Eisendrath dispelled any false dichotomy between the two modes of writing from the start. The success of a written work, she said, has more to do with whether a writer has followed their question than with its form, and either way of writing requires creativity and boldness.
Eisendrath has published two books, which she described in the workshop. The first – Poetry in a World of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2018) – is an academic investigation of the tension between experiential and empirical sensibilities in early modern practices of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is a vivid description of artworks, but also of other things such as cities, fountains, and more. When empiricists adopted such detailed description to provide an account of ‘things in themselves’, they came into tension with poets who used the same technique to describe the experience of things. As a consequence, literature became a repository for the subjectivity renounced by empiricism. Folded into this historical argument, Eisendrath said, is also a critique of current scholarly methods which aim to bracket subjectivity and provide an objective account of art – a problem that we would proceed to tackle in the workshop hands on.
Despite this diagnosis, Eisendrath said that her second, more experimental book was not meant to be an intervention in the state of academic writing but rather a ‘love letter to scholarship’. Gallery of Clouds (NYRB, 2021) is a very different kind of work exploring the paradoxes of intellectual life through reading Philip Sidney’s long romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Written in fragments and interlaced with images, the book is full of imagination – a fictional encounter between Eisendrath and Virginia Woolf in the afterlife, or an image of a worn and ancient hippopotamus figurine meant to invoke the relation between sixteenth-century gentlefolk and their estates, which bear the evidence of history. Gallery of Clouds aims to enact the problem it analyzes, Eisendrath explained, by creating the experience of wandering and shifting between different modes of reading.
Eisendrath reminded us that environmental aspects – the place in which we read and others who may share it, the material book, its former readers – are all part of our reading experience. She cited C.S. Lewis’s famous saying about how much he liked reading Italian literature at the window while recovering from a minor illness. Just then I was seated across from a large, sunny and leafy window and starting to feel a vague tickle in my throat. The layering of experience and my habit of doodling during lectures led me to sketch the scene in my notebook. Including the doodle alongside another one from Eisendrath’s lecture on a different topic the previous week feels true to her practice in Gallery of Clouds and to the interest both books take in the relationship between words and images.
In the second part of the workshop, we were invited to try for ourselves the two modes of observation and description we have been considering. Each participant chose one of two available prints – Pisanello’s The Vision of Saint Eustace and Andrea Mantegna’s The Triumph of Caesar (The Trumpeters) – and spent ten minutes describing it in writing as objectively as possible. We then spent another ten minutes writing a much more subjective description of the same painting, including the kinds of things that scholars usually leave out: What does the image remind you of? What is it like to try to write about it in this environment? What is the person next to you writing?
When we finished writing we discussed the transition from objective to subjective description and where the two modes of observation overlap. We agreed that objective and subjective perceptions were hard to distinguish, and one participant observed that both depend on directing and focusing attention, which undermines any sharp distinction between them. My own attention was caught by the embarrassment that many of us expressed about making our subjectivity more explicit in our writing. Anxieties about the reliability of memory and the possibility of error, doubts about legitimacy, and self-frustration came up repeatedly and garnered nods of agreement. It occurred to me that like the abrupt ending of Sidney’s unfinished Arcadia – ‘Whereat ashamed, (as hauing neuer done so much before in his life)’ – shame and its association with a kind of inner vacuity, a missing skill or detail, are closely linked to asserting subjectivity. In her Art of Poetry interview in the Paris Review, Elizabeth Bishop said that ‘there’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet’. Is this another case where critics and poets are more alike than they first seem? Is there nothing more embarrassing than being a scholar, too? Or is scholarship where we try to escape the ‘awful core of ego’ that Bishop thought necessary for poetry and found so embarrassing? The core always seems to contain too little or too much, in a way that is hard to accommodate in writing. Eisendrath’s invitation to think about the fundamental ways in which objectivity and subjectivity interact is the perfect open ending for the workshops in experimental criticism, leaving us with the question of what is so disturbing about our unique, situated perspective that we shun it from scholarship in the first place.
