The art of ekphrastic subversion: Goethe's optical iconotexts

The essay focuses on three ekphrastic scenes in Goethe's Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) and Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre) written in response to the famous Painting Descriptions (Gemaldebeschreibungen) of Friedrich Schlegel's Europa journal that had not only hastened the notorious defection of the German Nazarene movement from neoclassicism, but also challenged Lessing's Laocoon boundary between verbal and visual signs. The mixture of optical and rhetorical devices analyzed in Goethe's word-image hybrids reveals how the narrator teamed up with the scientist of Color Theory (Zur Farbenlehre) to invoke the iconographic scenes of the Painting Descriptions, in order to diffuse and subvert their doctrinal poetological purport.