Garrett Stewart - Böcker

The recent uproar over NSA surveillance can obscure the fact that surveillance has been an indelible part of contemporary life for decades. And cinema has long been aware of its power - and potential for abuse. In Closed Circuits, Garrett Stewart explores a panoply of films, from M and Rear Window to The Conversation and The Bourne Legacy, to analyze the ways in which cinema has articulated the concept of surveillance. While it has long been a mainstay of the thriller, surveillance, Stewart argues, speaks to something more foundational in the very work of the camera. The shared axis of montage and espionage - especially the way that point of view and editing techniques are designed to draw us in and make us forget the omnipresence of the camera - offers an entry point to larger questions about the politics of an oversight regime that is increasingly remote and robotic, a global technopticon. Dazzling in its breadth of reference, and far-reaching in its conclusions about both cinematic and real-world surveillance, Closed Circuits further confirms Garrett Stewart as among our leading theorists of narrative.

If you attend a contemporary art exhibition lately, you're unlikely to see much traditional painting or sculpture. Indeed, artists today are preoccupied with what happens when you leave behind assumptions about particular media such as painting, or woodcuts and instead focus on collisions between them, and the new forms and ideas that those collisions generate. Garrett Stewart in Transmedium dubs this new approach Conceptualism 2.0, an allusion in part to the computer images that are so often addressed by these works. A successor to 1960s Conceptualism, which posited that a material medium was unnecessary to the making of art, Conceptualism 2.0 features artworks that are transmedial, that place the aesthetic experience itself deliberately at the boundary between often incommensurable media. The result, Stewart shows, is art whose forced convergences break open new possibilities that are wholly surprising, intellectually enlightening, and often uncanny.

The hero stands on stage in high-definition 3-D while doubled on a crude pixel screen in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Alien ships leave Earth by dissolving at the conclusion of Arrival.  An illusory death spiral in Vertigo transitions abruptly to a studio set, jolting the spectator. These are a few of the startling visual moments that Garrett Stewart examines in Cinemachines, a compelling, powerful, and witty book about the cultural and mechanical apparatuses that underlie modern cinema.Engaging in fresh ways with revelatory special effects in the history of cinematic storytelling—from Buster Keaton’s breaching of the film screen in Sherlock Jr. to the pixel disintegration of a remotely projected hologram in Blade Runner 2049—Stewart’s book puts unprecedented emphasis on technique in moving image narrative. Complicating and revising the discourse on historical screen processes, Cinemachines will be crucial reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the movies from a celluloid to a digital medium.

Photography might be called the lost cause of cinema, gone in projection and too soon forgotten. But what is the mysterious region between photography and narrative cinema, between the photogram - a single film frame - and the illusion of motion one recognizes as the movies? In this study, Garrett Stewart discusses the photogram not only as the undertext of screen images but also in its unexpected links to the early modernist writings of James, Conrad, Forster, Joyce and others. Engaging the work of such media theorists as Eisenstein, Benjamin, Kracauer, Bazin, Baudry, Cavell, Deleuze and Jameson, this study pursues the suppressed photogram as it ripples the narrative surface of several dozen films from Lang and Chaplin through Bergman, Coppola and beyond. To locate the exact repercussions of such effects, Stewart includes over 300 frame enlargements drawn from genres as different as science fiction, film noir and recent Victorian costume drama.

"At last, a scrupulous and sustained--'earsighted'--study of that shadowy yet vital intersection of sound and sense without which literary reading remains a disembodied exercise...Stewart immerses us brilliantly in the poststructural method of a 'phonemic' analysis."--Geoffrey H. Hartman, author of Saving the Text "Stunningly articulate...Alongside brilliant exegeses of passsages from the major English poets, Stewart offers new and dazzling interpretations of the 'poetics of prose' in such novelists as Dickens, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The book is a tour de force, no doubt about it. In my opinion, Reading Voices will have not only a wide but a lasting reception."--Hayden White, author of Metahistory "This is exciting, virtuoso work in a playfully imaginative hermeneutic mode. Stewart's ear hears fascinating and compelling things, things which have a delightfully rich and thematically complex bearing on much larger textual issues."--Paul Fry, author of The Reach of Criticism "A truly original book...The first work in years to bring together linguistically informed criticism with more philosophically oriented literary theory.The resulting vision of literature is odd, personal, passionate, even outlandish. Not only is Stewart himself and extraordinary stylist, but his work suggests a breakthrough in stylistic criticism so radical as to revitalize the entire field."--Jay Clayton, author of Romantic Vision and the Novel

Garrett Stewart begins The Deed of Reading with a memory of his first hesitant confrontation, as a teenager, with poetic density. In that early verbal challenge he finds one driving force of literature: to make language young again in its surprise, coming alive in each new event of reading. But what exactly happens in the textual encounter to make literary phrasing resonate so deeply with readers? To take the measure of literary writing, The Deed of Reading convenes diverse philosophic commentary on the linguistics of literature, with stress on the complementary work of Stanley Cavell and Giorgio Agamben. Sympathetic to recent ventures in form-attentive analysis but resisting an emphasis on so-called surface reading, Stewart explores not some new formalism but the internal pressures of language in formation, registering the verbal infrastructure of literary prose as well as verse. In this mode of "contextual" reading, the context is language itself. Literary phrasing, tapping the speech act's own generative pulse, emerges as a latent philosophy of language in its own right, whereby human subjects, finding no secure place to situate themselves within language, settle for its taking place in, through, and between them. Stewart watches and hears this dynamics of wording played out in dozens of poems and novels over two centuries of English literary production—from Wordsworth and Shelley to Browning and Hopkins, from Poe and Dickens through George Eliot, Conrad, James, and on to Toni Morrison. The Deed of Reading offers a revisionary contribution to the ethic of verbal attention in the grip of "deep reading."

At every stage of her career, Barbra Streisand's genius finds its fullest measure in screen song, first in Emmy-winning TV specials, then in Hollywood blockbusters from Funny Girl to Funny Lady. She goes on, as emerging auteur, to direct her own "musical concepts" in A Star Is Born—before reconceiving the big-screen musical altogether in the writing as well as directing of her own starring role in Yentl ("A Film with Music"). In this intensive reading of the "actress-who-sings," Garrett Stewart notes the gender and ethnic stereotypes that Streisand shattered as the first openly Jewish superstar, while concentrating not just on the cultural difference she made but on the internal differentials of her unholy vocal gift—whose kinetic volatility shapes a kind of cinematic terrain all its own. Down through her filmed return to the concert stage, Stewart elicits the sinuous phonetic text of Streisand's on-screen musical delivery in a keenly attentive mode of audition that puts into fresh perspective the indelible aura of her stardom.

At every stage of her career, Barbra Streisand's genius finds its fullest measure in screen song, first in Emmy-winning TV specials, then in Hollywood blockbusters from Funny Girl to Funny Lady. She goes on, as emerging auteur, to direct her own "musical concepts" in A Star Is Born—before reconceiving the big-screen musical altogether in the writing as well as directing of her own starring role in Yentl ("A Film with Music"). In this intensive reading of the "actress-who-sings," Garrett Stewart notes the gender and ethnic stereotypes that Streisand shattered as the first openly Jewish superstar, while concentrating not just on the cultural difference she made but on the internal differentials of her unholy vocal gift—whose kinetic volatility shapes a kind of cinematic terrain all its own. Down through her filmed return to the concert stage, Stewart elicits the sinuous phonetic text of Streisand's on-screen musical delivery in a keenly attentive mode of audition that puts into fresh perspective the indelible aura of her stardom.

This is the first book to demonstrate the value of prose analysis - both appreciative and interpretive in its 'evaluations' - across dozens of authors, including Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison. The Value of Style in Fiction is designed not just for students and scholars of the English novel - and its verbal 'microplots' - but also for anyone interested in mastering the art of the sentence by 'writing along with' its finest examplars in a fully descriptive account: a stylistic challenge in its own right exemplified by Stewart's multifaceted critical modelling. Beginning with a state-of-the-field survey of prose poetics, this manual of invested reading concludes with an 'Inventory' of terms (bolded throughout) drawn primarily from grammar, rhetoric, etymology, and phonetics, but also narratology and poetic theory: a glossary whose consultation can help cross-map certain verbal tendencies in literary-historical evolution and its separate landmark writers.

Book, Text, Medium: Cross Sectional Reading for a Digital Age utilizes codex history, close reading, and language philosophy to assess the transformative arc between medieval books and today's e-books. It examines what happens to the reading experience in the twenty-first century when the original concept of a book is still held in the mind of a reader, if no longer in the reader's hand. Leading critic Garrett Stewart explores the play of mediation more generally, as the concept of book moves from a manufactured object to simply the language it puts into circulation. Framed by digital poetics, phonorobotics, and the rising popularity of audiobooks, this study sheds new light on both the history of reading and the negation of legible print in conceptual book art.

Book, Text, Medium: Cross Sectional Reading for a Digital Age utilizes codex history, close reading, and language philosophy to assess the transformative arc between medieval books and today's e-books. It examines what happens to the reading experience in the twenty-first century when the original concept of a book is still held in the mind of a reader, if no longer in the reader's hand. Leading critic Garrett Stewart explores the play of mediation more generally, as the concept of book moves from a manufactured object to simply the language it puts into circulation. Framed by digital poetics, phonorobotics, and the rising popularity of audiobooks, this study sheds new light on both the history of reading and the negation of legible print in conceptual book art.

This is the first book to demonstrate the value of prose analysis - both appreciative and interpretive in its 'evaluations' - across dozens of authors, including Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison. The Value of Style in Fiction is designed not just for students and scholars of the English novel - and its verbal 'microplots' - but also for anyone interested in mastering the art of the sentence by 'writing along with' its finest examplars in a fully descriptive account: a stylistic challenge in its own right exemplified by Stewart's multifaceted critical modelling. Beginning with a state-of-the-field survey of prose poetics, this manual of invested reading concludes with an 'Inventory' of terms (bolded throughout) drawn primarily from grammar, rhetoric, etymology, and phonetics, but also narratology and poetic theory: a glossary whose consultation can help cross-map certain verbal tendencies in literary-historical evolution and its separate landmark writers.

With its laser-focus on the verbal and visual infrastructure of narrative, The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors is the first sustained comparative study of how image patterns are tracked in prose and cinema. In film examples ranging from Citizen Kane through Apocalypse Now to Blade Runner 2049, then on to Christopher Nolan’s 2020 Tenet, Garrett Stewart follows the shift from celluloid to digital cinema through various narrative manifestations of the image, from freeze-frames to computer-generated special effects. By bringing cinema alongside literature, Stewart discovers a common tendency in contemporary storytelling, in both prose and visual narrative, from the ongoing trend of “mind-game” films to the often puzzling narrative eccentricities of such different writers as Nicholson Baker and Richard Powers—including the latter’s eerie mirroring of reader empathy in his 2021 Bewilderment.

With its laser-focus on the verbal and visual infrastructure of narrative, The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors is the first sustained comparative study of how image patterns are tracked in prose and cinema. In film examples ranging from Citizen Kane through Apocalypse Now to Blade Runner 2049, then on to Christopher Nolan’s 2020 Tenet, Garrett Stewart follows the shift from celluloid to digital cinema through various narrative manifestations of the image, from freeze-frames to computer-generated special effects. By bringing cinema alongside literature, Stewart discovers a common tendency in contemporary storytelling, in both prose and visual narrative, from the ongoing trend of “mind-game” films to the often puzzling narrative eccentricities of such different writers as Nicholson Baker and Richard Powers—including the latter’s eerie mirroring of reader empathy in his 2021 Bewilderment.

Garrett Stewart begins The Deed of Reading with a memory of his first hesitant confrontation, as a teenager, with poetic density. In that early verbal challenge he finds one driving force of literature: to make language young again in its surprise, coming alive in each new event of reading. But what exactly happens in the textual encounter to make literary phrasing resonate so deeply with readers? To take the measure of literary writing, The Deed of Reading convenes diverse philosophic commentary on the linguistics of literature, with stress on the complementary work of Stanley Cavell and Giorgio Agamben. Sympathetic to recent ventures in form-attentive analysis but resisting an emphasis on so-called surface reading, Stewart explores not some new formalism but the internal pressures of language in formation, registering the verbal infrastructure of literary prose as well as verse. In this mode of "contextual" reading, the context is language itself. Literary phrasing, tapping the speech act's own generative pulse, emerges as a latent philosophy of language in its own right, whereby human subjects, finding no secure place to situate themselves within language, settle for its taking place in, through, and between them. Stewart watches and hears this dynamics of wording played out in dozens of poems and novels over two centuries of English literary production—from Wordsworth and Shelley to Browning and Hopkins, from Poe and Dickens through George Eliot, Conrad, James, and on to Toni Morrison. The Deed of Reading offers a revisionary contribution to the ethic of verbal attention in the grip of "deep reading."

In The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens's early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author's verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a verbal alter ego identified as the Other, whose volatile and intensively linguistic, even sub-lexical presence is felt throughout Dickens's fiction. Across examples by turns comic, lyric, satiric, and melodramatic from the whole span of Dickens's fiction, the famously recognizable style is heard ghosted in a kind of running counterpoint ranging from obstreperous puns to the most elusive of internal echoes: effects not strictly channeled into the service of overall narrative drive, but instead generating verbal microplots all their own. One result is a new, ear-opening sense of what it means to take seriously Graham Greene's famous passing mention of Dickens's "secret prose."

In The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens's early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author's verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a verbal alter ego identified as the Other, whose volatile and intensively linguistic, even sub-lexical presence is felt throughout Dickens's fiction. Across examples by turns comic, lyric, satiric, and melodramatic from the whole span of Dickens's fiction, the famously recognizable style is heard ghosted in a kind of running counterpoint ranging from obstreperous puns to the most elusive of internal echoes: effects not strictly channeled into the service of overall narrative drive, but instead generating verbal microplots all their own. One result is a new, ear-opening sense of what it means to take seriously Graham Greene's famous passing mention of Dickens's "secret prose."

In The Ways of the Word, Garrett Stewart steps aside from theory to focus on the sheer pleasure of attentive reading and the excitement of recognizing the play of syllables and words upon which the best literary writing is founded. Emerging out of teaching creative writing and a broader effort to convene writers and critics, Stewart's "episodes in verbal attention" track the means to meaning through the byways of literary wording.Through close engagement with literary passages and poetic instances whose imaginative demands are their own reward, Stewart gathers exhibits from dozens of authors: from Dickinson, Dickens, and DeLillo to Whitman, Woolf, and Colson Whitehead. In the process, idiom, tense, etymology, and other elements of expressive language and its phonetic wordplay are estranged and heard anew. The Ways of the Word fluidly and intuitively reveals a verbal alchemy that is as riveting as it is elusive and mysterious.

In The Ways of the Word, Garrett Stewart steps aside from theory to focus on the sheer pleasure of attentive reading and the excitement of recognizing the play of syllables and words upon which the best literary writing is founded. Emerging out of teaching creative writing and a broader effort to convene writers and critics, Stewart's "episodes in verbal attention" track the means to meaning through the byways of literary wording.Through close engagement with literary passages and poetic instances whose imaginative demands are their own reward, Stewart gathers exhibits from dozens of authors: from Dickinson, Dickens, and DeLillo to Whitman, Woolf, and Colson Whitehead. In the process, idiom, tense, etymology, and other elements of expressive language and its phonetic wordplay are estranged and heard anew. The Ways of the Word fluidly and intuitively reveals a verbal alchemy that is as riveting as it is elusive and mysterious.

Attention Spans’ chronological review of Garrett Stewart’s critical approach tracks and maps the evolution of intersecting disciplines from late New Criticism through structuralism, deconstruction, narrative theory (by way of narratography), poetics, and media studies, in which Stewart’s has been so persistent and so eloquent a voice. Excerpts from his twenty books are framed by editorial retrospect, then linked by Stewart’s own commentary on the variety – and underlying vectors – of his interpretive career across aesthetic forms, from Victorian narrative to recent American fiction, classic celluloid cinema to postfilmic digital effects, inert book sculpture and literary wordplay to the soundscape of singing on screen. Accompanied by a glossary of his many influential coinages, this cornucopia of analyses is also a chronicle of evolving paradigms in the work of intensive reading.

Attention Spans’ chronological review of Garrett Stewart’s critical approach tracks and maps the evolution of intersecting disciplines from late New Criticism through structuralism, deconstruction, narrative theory (by way of narratography), poetics, and media studies, in which Stewart’s has been so persistent and so eloquent a voice. Excerpts from his twenty books are framed by editorial retrospect, then linked by Stewart’s own commentary on the variety – and underlying vectors – of his interpretive career across aesthetic forms, from Victorian narrative to recent American fiction, classic celluloid cinema to postfilmic digital effects, inert book sculpture and literary wordplay to the soundscape of singing on screen. Accompanied by a glossary of his many influential coinages, this cornucopia of analyses is also a chronicle of evolving paradigms in the work of intensive reading.

In his first book of essays, Garrett Stewart demonstrates and reframes his formidable powers as a close reader of a vast range of texts: novels, films, songs, book art, digital media, and more.Among the most prolific and exacting readers of his generation, Stewart is renowned for his virtuosic interventions across a number of humanistic fields, including prose narrative, screen studies, and literary theory. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and winner of the International Society for the Study of Narrative’s prize for Novel Violence (2009), Stewart draws on these varied realms in his intensive readings of enduring works across media – ones worthy of a re-view and a closer look.Closer Reading, like Stewart’s writing more broadly, offers up-close analyses of novels, poetry, cinema, and conceptual art, including chapters on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Dickens, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Cavell, and John le Carré. A collection a half-century in the making – yet brimming with critical notes from the vanguard – Closer Reading finds Stewart demonstrating, from sentence to sentence, a sustained rethinking of the value of close reading not just as a methodology but also as a cognitive disposition.Leaving paranoid, symptomatic, and surface reading to the side, Stewart revels in the workings of sentences and the many senses of media. Such a “prismatic reading” affords insight into the spectrum of interpretation and the bent light of interaction, refraction, and diffraction. To dwell in the astute and generous line of Stewart’s inquiry is to experience an exhilaration rare in critical commentary. Featuring full-length essays, including still-potent early publications and accompanied by an entirely new and wide-ranging interview with David LaRocca, Closer Reading provides a deep and satisfying critical survey of and immersion in Garrett Stewart’s inimitable oeuvre.