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.
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.
As David LaRocca tells us early in this volume, J Hillis Miller described Garrett Stewart, on the jacket of his second book, as 'more or less
sui generis.' This turned out to be a prophetic description of the most wide-ranging and least doctrinaire critic of his generation. It also aptly describes
Attention Spans, a book like no other, and one that does not belong to any recognisable genre. In staging a critical rereading of his own work, Stewart offers us an exhilarating history of aesthetic theory since New Criticism, which is also a virtuosic display of fine readerly attention. Continually unsettled, continually restless, it is written in what Stewart himself calls a 'language not quite gelled into the print that transmits it.' To read it is to feel, again and again, the lifted joy of shared thinking.
