Overview

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.

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Reviews

A critic of Garett Stewart’s brilliance and range deserves a 'Reader,' but this fascinating book is far more than a collection of an author’s most important articles. A 'writing journal' of a teaching career that incorporates brief extracts of important publications in the inspiring narrative of an immensely wide-ranging critical practice, Attention Spans engages the major developments of recent criticism. A tour de force. * Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, USA * Garrett Stewart is a multi-media close reader extraordinaire whose answerable style rewards close reading in turn. This selection of excerpts from each of his twenty books is interspersed with his own running commentary, stitching it all together and making his whole career’s research and thinking-through seem as though it were all taking place in present time, while remaining full of scrupulous attention to the ways in which his work has evolved. After a dialogue with the editor, full of yet newer directions, this astonishing volume concludes with a glossary of Stewart’s coinages. * Paul Fry, William Lampson Professor Emeritus of English, Yale University, USA * As David LaRocca tells us early in this volume, J Hillis Miller described Garrett Stewart, on the jacket of his first 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. * Peter Boxall, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford, UK *

Author Information

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.

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