The speaking picture's story in Hannah Rothschild's The Improbability of Love

This thesis explores how ekphrasis constructs a liminal position for a silent image in Hannah Rothschild's The Improbability of Love (2015) by representing a speaking picture in a historiographic metafictional context. The novel deals with Jean- Antoine Watteau's fictional painting and its discovery process by unfolding its history. Ekphrasis, as a verbal representation of a visual artwork, enables a transformation of Watteau's imaginary painting in Rothschild's novel in terms of description, narrative style and historiographic metafiction. By taking ekphrastic theory as the main framework, this thesis discusses the constant shift between binary oppositions such as the word and the image, presence and absence, subject and object and history and fiction by referring to poststructuralist and postmodernist traces. The substitution of juxtaposed concepts is analyzed in Jacques Derrida's poststructuralist terms, postmodernist fragmentation and multiplicity. The image, considered to be a silent and fixed object of beauty to be gazed at, gains movement through ekphrastic descriptions and turns out to be an active speaking subject and a narrator of the novel. As well as these descriptions, the multi-layered narrative structure and the utilization of historiographic metafiction are discussed in the framework of ekphrastic tradition since they also contribute to the representation of the artwork. Ekphrasis builds a bridge between literature and visual arts and this collaboration paves the way for new possibilities. The artwork in Rothschild's novel extends its presence from description to narration and history and breaks its frame as an autonomous conscious being.