Garrett Stewart

James O Freedman Professor of Letters University of Iowa Garrett Stewart

Examines the way Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf portrayed death in their fiction, and identifies changes in the modern depiction of death

Styles of Dying in British Fiction

Death Sentences

“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.

Medium to Object to Concept to Art

Bookwork

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?.

Modernism's Photo Synthesis

Between Film and Screen

Book, Painting, Text

The Look of Reading

"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

Literature and the Phonotext

Reading Voices

"Ready now, reader? Easy then. That should put you in the right historical frame of mind, put you in mind of the right historical frame. For it did seem easier then, certainly more relaxed. Like the addressed and otherwise rendered nineteenth-century reader who is my subject of study, you are invited to take it slow while we back our way into the last century. We do so by moving from an unexpected modernist send-up of Victorian direct address, an early twist of phrase in E. M. Forster's 1907 The Longest Journey, to the underlying aesthetic of classic realism on which even this one rhetorical irony is by no means intended to pull the plug. On the way back to the nineteenth century, certain realist assumptions help mark out our course."--from Dear Reader With the "great tradition" from Austen through Dickens and Eliot to Hardy read here for the first time alongside the non-canonical best-sellers of the period, we get a revised picture of an evolving readership narrated rather than merely implied, the mass audience conscripted, written with, figured in. Redirecting response aesthetics away from the a priori reader function toward this reader figure, Garrett Stewart's Dear Reader intercepts two tendencies in the recent criticism of fiction: the blanket audience determinations of ideological critique and the thinness of historicizing discourse analysis when divorced from literary history's own discursive field.

James O Freedman Professor of Letters University of Iowa Garrett Stewart

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