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Abstract: In the twentieth century the appearance of a great number of innovative verbal and visual portraits, created by modernist writers and painters, haunted by questions of identity and human representability, was determined by the tangible shift in sociocultural ideas about selfhood and the manners of its construction. Analyzing the poetics of literary and pictorial portraits created by Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne, this paper focuses on the intermedial flexibility of this genre and investigates the strategies of destruction and deformation of traditional referential portrait conventions through the juxtaposition of mimetic and non-mimetic elements, the "still life" approach to portraiture, intertextual scaffolding, activation of genre memory, and the parodization of the concept of resemblance. It demonstrates that the indexical tracing of the individual's particular identity as a traditional function of portraiture is replaced in modernist portraiture by the fluid process of identity construction and erosion.
Keywords: modernist portraiture, literary portrait, non-mimetic representation, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound
The term "literary portrait" is very thought-provoking, as it refers directly to the question of the relationships between the arts and the dialectic between word and image. It encourages us to think broadly, searching for links between different art forms and revealing the counterpoints that they create for each other. What do we mean when we use the word "portrait" to define literary texts? Is it just a metaphor, which arose due to an inclination to establish similarities and substitute one thing for another? Is it a manifestation of the idea of a synthesis of the arts (akin to Horace's "ut pictura poesis," Simonides of Ceos' "painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking painting," or Philip Sidney's poetry as a speaking picture) that goes back to the archaic period?
In the context of this article, the notion of a portrait is used in relation to genre as a cross-media orocess rather than a fixed, distinctive entity. A broad understanding of genre invites us to look at the iterary portrait through the lens of the philosophy of portraiture in which the notion of personality is constantly transformed and rethought. Every cultural and historical era puts forward its portrait and its...