@article{Sibul_2021, title={Ekphrastic Self and the Dream House of (Re)Collection: Ishiguro’s ‘Artist’ in a ‘Floating World’}, volume={1}, url={https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/meliora/article/view/7938}, DOI={10.52214/meliora.v1i1.7938}, abstractNote={<p>This paper examines the text’s material memory despite aesthetic ‘forgetfulness’ in Kazuo Ishiguro’s <em>An Artist of the Floating Word</em>. Repurposing traditional notions of <em>ekphrasis—</em>the literary description of visual art—to better understand the modern process of self-making, this essay offers Ishiguro’s ‘ekphrastic occasion’ as a tangible remnant that disrupts ideas of objectivity just as it fabricates them. Further, it claims that subjective narrative, such as first-person memory or vivid individual portraiture, often functions as a palpable archive even as it seeks to obfuscate the idea of an objective archive. In this way, material description, rather than adhering to Sebald’s post-war ideal of “unpretentious objectivity,” becomes instead a nuanced site of heightened subjectivity (<em>The Natural History of Destruction </em>53). We see the “play of writing and reading the world” as an insistently fraught and self-conscious endeavor (Haraway, <em>The Cyborg Manifesto</em> 152). Along these theoretical lines, this argument seeks to harness the idea of a ‘sentient’ archive to reframe the traditional relation between object (the novel) and subject (the reader) as one of mutual animation, breath, and correspondence.</p>}, number={1}, journal={Meliora}, author={Sibul, Maya}, year={2021}, month={Apr.} }