Creative Writing Practice of Ekphrastic Intervention: A Case Study of Literary Responses to A Blind Girl Reading by Ejnar Nielsen

This chapter aims to shed light onto the world-building strategies employed in writing a literary response to an art prompt, a creative writing practice commonly known as ekphrasis. My case study of contemporary ekphrastic responses explores the stylistic manifestations of writerly interventions into a visual scene by drawing on Text World Theory (Gavins, Text World Theory: An Introduction, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007; Werth, Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, London, Longman, 1999). Hence, this research presents two significant contributions. Firstly, I propose to expand the application of Text World Theory “beyond senses” to the analysis of any mode of communication processed in the mind. Secondly, I suggest a novel approach to analysing writing in response to art—a model of ekphrastic intervention, in which I compartmentalise the language features of an interrelation (Mason, Intertextuality in Practice, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2019) within ekphrasis that transpire the varying degrees of conceptual distance between an image and its literary rendition.