Attention Spans: Garrett Stewart, a Reader

Description

More than singling out the fertility of a unique and indefatigable career, this chronological review of Garrett Stewart's 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 Stewart's has been so persistent and so eloquent a voice. Excerpts from Stewart's 20 books are framed by editorial retrospect and overview before being linked by Stewart's 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.