Overview

Distinguished literary and film theorists convene to engage with Garrett Stewart’s twenty books of inter-medial analysis, shelved across several disciplines, in a collection of essays as multifaceted and resonant as Stewart's own writing. Critical luminaries from the fields of literary and film studies assess the methods and scope of Garrett Stewart’s career-long work across the fields of literary history and poetics, cinema and media studies. The unprecedented scope of Stewart’s interests also embraces certain lines of development in art history down through the so-called post-medium condition, including abstract as well as figurative painting, conceptual book sculpture—followed by an interactive e-text monograph on the place of time-based images in contemporary gallery installation. Through it all, under the rubric of what Stewart calls “narratography,” there is a continual return to microplots of fictional phrasing, from Victorian novels to post-millennial American fiction. Given Stewart’s steadily tuned ear for the play of vocal enunciation, his interests arc in this way from a performative phonetics of print text to a study of star-singing on screen. Assorted essays variously analyze directly, or extrapolate from, Stewart’s evolving methodology: a “signature” analytic intensity tested in its yield on interpretive challenges from literary prose and art history through cinema theory and screen stardom. Bandwidths accompanies a companion volume, Attention Spans—Stewart’s “autobiographical,” or better, autophilosophical chronicle of method and evolution. Contributors to Bandwidths either address Stewart’s aims and achievements directly or build implicitly on them in fresh investigations of their own. Bandwidths is a rare window into the genealogy, and contested energies, of interpretive endeavor, and offers interpretive and methodological interventions into fields ready to be reminded and recharged by Stewart’s stalwart catalogue of indefatigable literary-critical and intermedial offerings.

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Reviews

Here is a volume of writing about voices, faces, sentences, songs, paintings, spelling, mirrors, reading, technology, time, and other objects of considerable interest. How could one evoke and study such diverse matters without getting lost? We may not know the answer, but this book does. Its themes divide but its many roads keep meeting. Language is not only a medium but a source of light. A film looks out at its viewer and back at the material it is made of. No one splits hairs here, but many of the writers like to split words. The result isn’t always immediately intelligible, but it is always, to borrow an example from Garrett Stewart, intel/legible. An amazing work of critical theory and practice. * Michael Wood, Professor Emeritus of English, Princeton University, USA * Garrett Stewart’s longtime readers will be familiar with a feeling of pleasant incredulity: how can anyone read this widely and always this well? In gathering an A-team of equally intense critics around him, Bandwidths offers something else almost beyond belief: a dazzling group intellectual experience that is also intensely moving—a snapshot of literary and cultural criticism at its collective best. * David Kurnick, Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA * With the vast philosophical erudition and rigorous analytical skills that are his trademark, David LaRocca here brilliantly introduces Garrett Stewart’s unique body of readings and writings, ‘across media,’ while bringing together an original and reasoned set of critical interventions by distinctive commentators (all of specialists in their respective fields). What results is a groundbreaking and wide-ranging work, an intellectual adventure of dazzling intensity, that is bound to become a standard reference for any future engagement with—and further elaboration of—Stewart’s ‘inter-medial’ approach and the refreshing insights and methods it continues to inspire and effect in literary and historical investigations of modern narrative and poetics, as well as in contemporary visual arts and media studies. * Hent de Vries, Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities, New York University, USA *

Here is a volume of writing about voices, faces, sentences, songs, paintings, spelling, mirrors, reading, technology, time, and other objects of considerable interest. How could one evoke and study such diverse matters without getting lost? We may not know the answer, but this book does. Its themes divide but its many roads keep meeting. Language is not only a medium but a source of light. A film looks out at its viewer and back at the material it is made of. No one splits hairs here, but many of the writers like to split words. The result isn’t always immediately intelligible, but it is always, to borrow an example from Garrett Stewart, intel/legible. An amazing work of critical theory and practice. * Michael Wood, Professor Emeritus of English, Princeton University, USA * Garrett Stewart’s longtime readers will be familiar with a feeling of pleasant incredulity: how can anyone read this widely and always this well? In gathering an A-team of equally intense critics around him, Bandwidths offers something else almost beyond belief: a dazzling group intellectual experience that is also intensely moving—a snapshot of literary and cultural criticism at its collective best. * David Kurnick, Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA * With the vast philosophical erudition and rigorous analytical skills that are his trademark, David LaRocca here brilliantly introduces Garrett Stewart’s unique body of readings and writings, ‘across media,’ while bringing together an original and reasoned set of critical interventions by distinctive commentators (all specialists in their respective fields). What results is a groundbreaking and wide-ranging work, an intellectual adventure of dazzling intensity, that is bound to become a standard reference for any future engagement with—and further elaboration of—Stewart’s ‘inter-medial’ approach and the refreshing insights and methods it continues to inspire and effect in literary and historical investigations of modern narrative and poetics, as well as in contemporary visual arts and media studies. * Hent de Vries, Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities, New York University, USA *

Author Information

David LaRocca is author, editor, or coeditor of more than a dozen books. He edited Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind (Bloomsbury, 2021), Inheriting Stanley Cavell (Bloomsbury, 2020), a commemorative issue of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies (2019), and Stanley Cavell's Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003). He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghampton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York College at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University.

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