Are literature and the visual arts compatible "sister" arts or bitter rivals?  An investigation of the often competitive relationships among verbal and visual media, focusing on the problem of constructing and representing visual arts in words.
Topics include: painting, sculpture, and photography; spectatorship; the ekphrastic tradition; the gendering of narrative and visual arts.  Authors include: Lessing, Goethe, Hoffman, Buchner, Sacher-Masoch, Rilke, Schnitzler, Kafka, Mann, Bachmann, Sebald, Benjamin, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan.