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.
Larocca, David: - David LaRocca, Ph.D., is the author or contributing editor of seventeen books, including several from Bloomsbury. He edited Stanley Cavell's Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003) and Metacinema (2021). Earlier edited volumes are devoted to the philosophy of documentary film, war films, and the cinema of Charlie Kaufman. He has taught philosophy, rhetoric, and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the New York Public Library, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University. He served as Harvard University's Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom and, like Cavell before him, was honored with the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. www.DavidLaRocca.org
