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. 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 within ekphrasis that transpire the varying degrees of conceptual distance between an image and its literary rendition.