Attention Spans: Garrett Stewart, a Reader

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More than singling out the fertility of a unique and indefatigable career, this chronological review of Garrett Stewarts critical approach serves to track and map the evolution of intersecting disciplines from late New Criticism through structuralism, deconstruction, psychopoetics, and the newer historicisms, all part of a burgeoning interdisciplinary spectrum in which Stewarts has been so persistent and so eloquent a voice. Excerpts from Stewarts 20 books are framed by editorial retrospect and overview before being linked by Stewarts own commentary on the variety and underlying vectors of his interpretive career across media, from Victorian narrative to contemporary American fiction, classic celluloid cinema to contemporary digital effects, the painting of readers through the conceptual ironies of inert book sculpture, literary wordplay to the soundscape of singing on screen. Accompanied by a glossary of his many influential coinages, from phonotext to prose friction, this cornucopia of eye-opening analyses is also a chronicle of evolving paradigms in the work of intensive reading.

Author Bio

David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of more than a dozen books, including The Geschlecht Complex (Bloomsbury 2022), Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind (Bloomsbury 2021), and Inheriting Stanley Cavell (Bloomsbury 2020). He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York College at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University. Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa, USA, having previously held teaching appointments at Boston University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford University, Princeton University, and the Universities of London (Queen Mary), Konstanz, and Fribourg (Switzerland). He is the author of 18 books, including Novel Violence (2009), which was awarded the Perkins Prize for the best book on narrative (International Society for the Study of Narrative), and Between Film and Screen (1999), which was a short-listed finalist for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. In 2010 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.