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 this profusely illustrated meditation on the phenomenon of "museum cinema," the screening of films in art museums, Garrett Stewart explores the aesthetic and formal issues raised by the proliferation of screens and films in museums in the digital era. Taking up dozens of screen artifacts over the last six decades, from 16mm loops to CCTV montage, Cinesthesia investigates in exemplary depth an array of landmark innovations from the 1960s down through the latest conceptualist exhibitions. Probing and comparative at once, it is the first study to place individual works under close formal and cultural analysis, and in steady dialogue with each other, not just as intrinsic experimental ventures but as medial challenges: challenges both to their parent forms and genres (theatrical film, broadcast TV) and to the contemplative aesthetic of museum looking. The kinetics of watching are found in this way, repeatedly and often ironically, to reroute or even derange – and ultimately to reform – the apprehending gaze. Cinesthesia includes 44 full-page colour illustrations by nearly 30 artists, including Christian Marclay, Tacita Dean, John Akomfrah, Rodney Graham, Eve Sussman and Matej Kren. "How is it – by what aesthetic criteria – that we, in ticketed public space, go to see film without going to the movies? What happens, that is, when screening times are replaced by the intermittent and elective time of transient viewing in sectored zones of a gallery layout? What new (audio-) visual parameters, in other words, are set in place when moving-image work finds itself welcomed into the environs of the proverbial 'fine' (or plastic) arts?" — Garrett Stewart
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.
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
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.
“There they rest, inert, impertinent, in gallery space—those book forms either imitated or mutilated, replicas of reading matter or its vestiges. Strange, after its long and robust career, for the book to take early retirement in a museum, not as rare manuscript but as functionless sculpture. Readymade or constructed, such book shapes are canceled as text when deposited as gallery objects, shut off from their normal reading when not, in some yet more drastic way, dismembered or reassembled.” So begins Bookwork, which follows our passion for books to its logical extreme in artists who employ found or simulated books as a sculptural medium. Investigating the conceptual labor behind this proliferating international art practice, Garrett Stewart looks at hundreds of book-like objects, alone or as part of gallery installations, in this original account of works that force attention upon a book’s material identity and cultural resonance. Less an inquiry into the artist’s book than an exploration of the book form’s contemporary objecthood, Stewart’s interdisciplinary approach traces the lineage of these aggressive artifacts from the 1919 Unhappy Readymade of Marcel Duchamp down to the current crisis of paper-based media in the digital era. Bookwork surveys and illustrates a stunning variety of appropriated and fabricated books alike, ranging from hacksawed discards to the giant lead folios of Anselm Kiefer. The unreadable books Stewart engages with in this timely study are found, again and again, to generate graphic metaphors for the textual experience they preclude, becoming in this sense legible after all.
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.
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.
Long before the 2013 NSA scandal about electronic surveillance, narrative cinema had become a weathervane of social phobias in regard to national security, drawing on a long history of surveillance both as theme and as audiovisual machination that saw its first heyday with the Weimar cinema of Fritz Lang. This book's analytical return to apparatus theory, and especially to suture theory's contrapuntal logic of seeing unseen, contributes to a new view of digital optics in this regard: one of contemporary cinema's most urgent cultural as well as technological flashpoints.
Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni claimed, three decades ago, that different conceptions of time helped define the split in film between European humanism and American science fiction. And as Garrett Stewart argues here, this transatlantic division has persisted since cinema’s 1995 centenary, made more complex by the digital technology that has detached movies from their dependence on the sequential frames of the celluloid strip. Brilliantly interpreting dozens of recent films—from Being John Malkovich, Donnie Darko, and The Sixth Sense to La mala educación and Caché —Stewart investigates how their treatments of time reflect the change in media from film’s original rolling reel to today’s digital pixel. He goes on to show—with 140 stills—how American and European narratives confront this shift differently: while Hollywood movies tend to revolve around ghostly afterlives, psychotic doubles, or violent time travel, their European counterparts more often feature second sight, erotic telepathy, or spectral memory. Stewart questions why these recent plots, in exploring temporality, gravitate toward either supernatural or uncanny apparitions rather than themes of digital simulation. In doing so, he provocatively continues the project he began with Between Film and Screen, breaking new ground in visual studies, cinema history, and media theory.
Victorian novels, Garrett Stewart argues, hurtle forward in prose as violent as the brutal human existence they chronicle. In Novel Violence, he explains how such language assaults the norms of written expression and how, in doing so, it counteracts the narratives it simultaneously propels. Immersing himself in the troubling plots of Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Stewart uses his brilliant new method of narratography to trace the microplots of language as they unfold syllable by syllable. By pinpointing where these linguistic narratives collide with the stories that give them context, he makes a powerful case for the centrality of verbal conflict to the experience of reading Victorian novels. He also maps his finely wrought argument on the spectrum of influential theories of the novel—including those of Georg Lukács and Ian Watt—and tests it against Edgar Allan Poe’s antinovelistic techniques. In the process, Stewart shifts critical focus toward the grain of narrative and away from more abstract analyses of structure or cultural context, revealing how novels achieve their semantic and psychic effects and unearthing, in prose, something akin to poetry.
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.
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.
A blend of film reading with vocal analysis in appreciation of Barbra Streisand’s unmatched contribution to lyric drama on screen. 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.
What is the mysterious region between photography and the phenomenon of narrative cinema, between the photogram - a single film frame - and the illusion of motion we recognise as movies?.
If you attend a contemporary art exhibition today, 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.
This is a book about terminals and boundaries, mortality and closure, the infinitesimals of style and the finite limits of representational language, about least and last things together. It is a book, to start with, about three vast and familiar facts of life and art: death, content, and form. Only by their particular triangulation in the genre of prose fiction do they mark out the hypothesis of the present study: that death in fiction is the fullest instance of form indexing content, is indeed the moment when content, comprising the imponderable of negation and vacancy, can be found dissolving to pure form. Death in narrative yields, by yielding to, sheer style.
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.
Including 6 Volume History of Women's Suffrage (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Emmeline Pankhurst, Anna Howard Shaw, Millicent G. Fawcett, Jane Addams, Lucy Stone, Carrie Catt, Alice Paul)
Including 6 Volume History of Women's Suffrage (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Emmeline Pankhurst, Anna Howard Shaw, Millicent G. Fawcett, Jane Addams, Lucy Stone, Carrie Catt, Alice Paul)
This meticulously edited collection presents the most prominent figures of the Women's suffrage movement in the United States of America and the United Kingdom: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Emmeline Pankhurst, Anna Howard Shaw, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Jane Addams, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul. This edition includes as well the complete 6 volume history of the movement - from its beginnings through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which enfranchised women in the U.S. in 1920. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement. Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) was a British political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement who helped women win the right to vote. Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919) was a leader of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was also a physician and one of the first ordained female Methodist ministers in the United States. Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929) was a British feminist, intellectual, political and union leader, and writer. Jane Addams (1860-1935), known as the "mother" of social work, was a pioneer American settlement activist, public philosopher, sociologist, protestor, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. Lucy Stone (1818-1893) was a prominent U.S. orator, abolitionist, and suffragist, and a vocal advocate and organizer promoting rights for women. Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) was an American women's suffrage leader who campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave U.S. women the right to vote in 1920. Alice Stokes Paul (1885-1977) was an American suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist.
James Leo Garrett Jr., has been called "the last of the gentlemen theologians" and "the dean of Southern Baptist theologians." In The Collected Writings of James Leo Garrett Jr., 1950-2015, the reader will find a truly dazzling collection of works that clearly evince the meticulous scholarship, the even-handed treatment, the biblical fidelity, the wide historical breadth, and the honest sincerity that have made the work and person of James Leo Garrett Jr., so esteemed and revered among so many. The first two volumes of the series explore Dr. Garrett's writings on the experience, history, and lives of Baptist Christians, and this inaugural volume specifically considers Baptists, Baptist views of the Bible, and Anabaptists. Spanning sixty-five years and touching on topics from Baptist history, theology, ecclesiology, church history and biography, religious liberty, Roman Catholicism, and the Christian life, The Collected Writings of James Leo Garret Jr., 1950-2015 will inform and inspire readers regardless of their religious or denominational affiliations.
An effervescent history of beer brewing in the American capital city. Imagine the jubilation of thirsty citizens in 1796 when the Washington Brewery—the city’s first brewery—opened. Yet the English-style ales produced by the early breweries in the capital and in nearby Arlington and Alexandria sat heavy on the tongue in the oppressive Potomac summers. By the 1850s, an influx of German immigrants gave a frosty reprieve to their new home in the form of light but flavorful lagers. Brewer barons like Christian Heurich and Albert Carry dominated the taps of city saloons until production ground to a halt with the dry days of Prohibition. Only Heurich survived, and when the venerable institution closed in 1956, Washington, D.C., was without a brewery for fifty-five years. Author and beer scholar Garrett Peck taps this high-gravity history while introducing readers to the bold new brewers leading the capital’s recent craft beer revival. “Why’d it take us [DC’s brewing culture] so long to get back on the wagon? Capital Beer will answer all your questions in the endearing style of your history buff friend who you can’t take to museums (in a good way!).” —DCist “In brisk and lively prose Peck covers 240 years of local brewing history, from the earliest days of British ale makers through the influx of German lagermeisters and up to the present-day craft breweries. . . . Richly illustrated with photographs both old and new, as well as a colorful collection of her art, Capital Beer is almost as much fun to read as “sitting in an outdoor beer garden and supping suds with friends over a long, languid conversation.”” —The Hill Rag
A Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) Tannhäuser played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyzes how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism. In the original medieval myth, a Christian knight lives in sin with the seductive pagan goddess Venus in the Venusberg. He escapes her clutches and makes his way to Rome to seek absolution from the Pope. The Pope does not pardon Tannhäuser and he returns to the Venusberg. During the course of A Knight at the Opera, readers will see how Tannhäuser evolves from a medieval knight, to Heine's German scoundrel in early modern Europe, to Wagner's idealized German male, and finally to Peretz's pious Jewish scholar in the Land of Israel. Venus herself also undergoes major changes from a pagan goddess, to a lusty housewife, to an overbearing Jewish mother. The book also discusses how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was so inspired by Wagner's opera that he wrote The Jewish State while attending performances of it, and he even had the Second Zionist Congress open to the music of Tannhäuser's overture. A Knight at the Opera uses Tannhäuser as a way to examine the changing relationship between Jews and the broader world during the advent of the modern era, and to question if any art, even that of a prominent anti-Semite, should be considered taboo.
The Teacher’s Attention is a fresh take on relationships in schools. Looking beyond our obsession with raising test scores, this book recognizes that education is a key partner in raising children. Garrett Delavan contends that allowing students, educators and parents to navigate a smaller number of relationships—a concept he calls "relationship load"—provides many benefits, including a better chance at achieving equal access to a good education for all children. Delavan shows how class size, school size, and longer-term student-teacher relationships are all equally critical components for educating our children ethically and successfully. After examining these proposed reforms in detail, Delavan also considers counterarguments and provides a detailed projection of costs and savings, putting to rest the assumption that smaller classes and smaller schools are necessarily more expensive. Finally, the book discusses possible steps toward implementation, showing how the author's proposed reforms are remarkably practical.
Tis the season to celebrate, to love, to dream, to hope. Unfortunately, many people have lost almost everything they have - including hope in this most festive and beautiful of times. Across the globe, authors, illustrators, and artists of all sorts have come together in the anthology you now hold in your hands with one goal in mind. To give hope. To spread love. To give people a chance to dream again. Christmas Lites V is a special anthology. Every dime raised goes directly to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV). Not a single person who worked on this book or donated their time and their art form to it receives anything from it, other than the knowledge that he/she is making a difference in those affected by domestic violence. Inside these pages are stories of all genres-Romance, fantasy, horror, action, children's stories, stories written BY children. Please, dive inside, read, laugh, and spread the love and joy.
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