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Metaphor vs Ekphrasis - What's the difference?

metaphor | ekphrasis |

As nouns the difference between metaphor and ekphrasis

is that metaphor is the use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like or as, which would imply a simile while ekphrasis is a clear, intense, self-contained argument or pictorial description of an object, especially of an artwork.

metaphor

English

(wikipedia metaphor)

Noun

  • (uncountable, figure of speech) The use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like'' or ''as , which would imply a simile.
  • * What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors''', metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are '''metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.'' — Friedrich Nietzsche, ''On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , 1870, translated by Daniel Beazeale, 1979.
  • (countable, rhetoric) The word or phrase used in this way. An implied comparison.

    • Hypernyms

    * figure of speech

    Derived terms

    * dead metaphor * extended metaphor * malaphor * metaphorical * metaphorical extension * metaphoricity * metaphorism * stale metaphor

    See also

    * analogy * idiom * metonymy * simile

    ekphrasis

    English

    (wikipedia ekphrasis)

    Alternative forms

    * ecphrasis

    Noun

    (ekphrases)
  • (rhetoric) A clear, intense, self-contained argument or pictorial description of an object, especially of an artwork.
  • :* 2004': One [trope] is '''''ekphrasis'' , the literary description of a work of art, the most famous example of which may be the careful depiction of the shield of Achilles in book 18 of the ''Iliad''. — Daniel Donoghue, ''Old English Literature (Blackwell 2004, p. 75)