earticle

영어

This study examines rebellious role of ekphrasis poems of Tate Britain on Google Arts and Culture. Tate Britain online museum exhibits John Hegley’s two ekphrasis poems representing C.R.W Nevinson’s Arrival and Soul of Soulless City. Traditionally, Nevinson’s two paintings have been analyzed through the lenses of Modernism and Futurism, with an emphasis on simultaneity divorced from historicity. Hegley’s two ekphrasis poems discover personal stories from three small persons painted in Arrival and give them a prosopopoeia voice. This voice speaks personal history, which has been silenced under the grand vision of Futurism and makes the text uninterpreted by using both languages English and French and multiple perspectives. In the poem of Soul of Soulless City, the prosopopoeia voice also mocks Futurism by evoking nostalgia and undermining the seriousness of Modernism. The principles of the ‘father’ that Futurism once sought to uphold are undermined by the nostalgic lament of the ‘mother.’ Likewise, the seriousness that Modernism embraced as poetic beauty is shattered by the comical backdrop of light-hearted music of the poem. With Hegley’s two ekphrasis poems, Nevinson’s two paintings in the online museum are re-created as new texts that resist Futurism.