Garrett Stewart

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Garrett Stewart
Born (1945-01-05) January 5, 1945 (age 76)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Yale University (MA, PhD)
University of Southern California (BA)
Notable work
  • Reading Voices, Between Film and Screen
Institutions University of California, Santa Barbara
University of Iowa
LanguageEnglish
Main interests
Notable ideas

Garrett Stewart (born January 5, 1945) is an American literary and film theorist. He has served as the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters in the English Department at the University of Iowa since 1993.

Contents

Career

Stewart graduated with a B.A. from the University of Southern California in 1967 and then earned a Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1971. He taught at Boston University and the University of California, Santa Barbara before joining the University of Iowa faculty.

Across his career, Stewart has pursued a methodology of intense close-reading in the mediums of print, film, and (most recently) conceptual art. He describes his own work as existing at the intersection of stylistics and narrative theory. [1] Examining the ways in which the larger structures of plot are operative at even the smallest of scales prompted Stewart in 2007 to develop the term "narratography"—i.e., a mapping of the ways in which technique constructs a particular narrative mode, whether in terms of stylistics (print) or editing/montage (film). [2] Stewart describes narratography as "searching out the 'microplots' of narrative development in the inflections of technique, audiovisual or linguistic". [1]

Work and main ideas

In his 1990 book Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Stewart argues that literature, despite its visual appearance, is essentially an acoustic medium. [3] He draws on the neurophysiological phenomenon of "subvocalization" to suggest that literary poetics are produced by the "voice" that the reader gives to a text—what Stewart calls the "phonetic undertow of literary writing". [1] Subvocalization has been corroborated by empirical science. Minuscule movements in the larynx and other muscles involved in speech have been observed in subjects during silent reading. While the vocal cords do not outwardly activate, it has been proposed that subvocalization reduces the cognitive load on working memory, and that reading comprehension depends as much on the way words "sound" in the reader's mind as it does on the words' visual (typographical) arrangement. [4] Stewart argues that this phonotext, so often ignored by the "phonophobia" of post-Derridean deconstruction, opens up new inroads to literary analysis. [2] When Shakespeare's Juliet asks "What's in a name?", for example, aurally she might also declare, "What sin a name". [5] Stewart argues that our traditionally vision-centric reading habits cause us to be "deaf" to these permutations.

In his 1999 book Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis, Stewart draws on ideas in film theory—specifically the work of Gilles Deleuze as well as British screen theory and its emphasis on the cinematic apparatus—to argue that as an art form cinema is haunted by its basis in still photography. [6] While cinema creates the illusion of live action, this is only made possible by a strip of still frames as they speed past the projector. Stewart is interested in the ways in which film tries, and often fails, to repress this stillness in its representations of time and movement. In this respect, he views the various techniques of cinematic plotting to be influenced—if not determined—by the very machinery that makes them possible. If that's the case, then new/different film technologies ought to engender new/different kinds of plots and cinematic styles. Such is Stewart's contention in a follow-up book, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (2007), where he argues that digital filmmaking is subsequently haunted by its basis, not in still photography, but the pixel array, leading to the internally-morphing representations of time in recent sci-fi films like the Wachowskis' The Matrix (1999) or Spielberg's Minority Report (2002). [7]

Stewart has published numerous other books, ranging from language in Charles Dickens to representations of death in British fiction. His 2009 Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction was awarded the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. More recently his scholarship has turned toward digital cinema and modes of surveillance (e.g., Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance [2014]) as well as conceptual art (e.g., Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art [2011] and Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art [2017]). He describes the common linkage between these various projects:

For me, it's always first of all the medium that matters—and in a quite material sense, including the differential function of phonetics and frame-advance in literary and film "texts" respectively. Or cross-wired technical effects in conceptual art. With interpretive viewing posited as its own kind of "reading", my emphasis is everywhere on process rather than product: on knowing how it is that we read before determining what it is, in all its cultural and political ramifications, that we are out to understand. [2]

Stewart remains active in his research and teaching at the University of Iowa. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. [1]

Related Research Articles

Essay Written work often reflecting the authors personal point of view

An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have traditionally been sub-classified as formal and informal. Formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.

Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though these three disciplines interrelate.

Modernism Philosophical and art movement

Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.

Plot (narrative) Cause-and-effect sequence of events in a narrative

In a literary work, film, or other narrative, the plot is the sequence of events where each affects the next one through the principle of cause-and-effect. The causal events of a plot can be thought of as a series of events linked by the connector "and so". Plots can vary from the simple—such as in a traditional ballad—to forming complex interwoven structures, with each part sometimes referred to as a subplot or imbroglio.

A narrative, story or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, still or moving images, or any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. Along with argumentation, description, and exposition, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which the narrator communicates directly to the reader. The school of literary criticism known as Russian formalism has applied methods used to analyse narrative fiction to non-fictional texts such as political speeches.

Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasises its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the audience to be aware they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.

Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the study and interpretation of texts of all types and/or spoken language in regard to their linguistic and tonal style, where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals and/or in different situations or settings. For example, the vernacular, or everyday language may be used among casual friends, whereas more formal language, with respect to grammar, pronunciation or accent, and lexicon or choice of words, is often used in a cover letter and résumé and while speaking during a job interview.

A frame story is a literary technique that serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, where an introductory or main narrative sets the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories. The frame story leads readers from a first story into one or more other stories within it. The frame story may also be used to inform readers about aspects of the secondary narrative(s) that may otherwise be hard to understand. This should not be confused with narrative structure.

Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. It is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov. Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian Formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).

Experimental film Cinematic works that are experimental form or content

Experimental film, experimental cinema, or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.

D. A. Miller is an American literary critic and film scholar. He is John F. Hotchkis Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Paracinema is an academic term to refer to a wide variety of film genres out of the mainstream, bearing the same relationship to 'legitimate' film as paraliterature like comic books and pulp fiction bears to literature.

Classical Hollywood cinema Style of filmmaking characteristic of American cinema between the 1910s and the 1960s

Classical Hollywood cinema is a term used in film criticism to describe both a narrative and visual style of filmmaking which became characteristic of American cinema between the 1910s and the 1960s. It eventually became the most powerful and pervasive style of filmmaking worldwide. Similar or associated terms include classical Hollywood narrative, the Golden Age of Hollywood, Old Hollywood, and classical continuity.

David Bordwell

David Jay Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988), Making Meaning (1989), and On the History of Film Style (1997).

Thomas Pavel is a literary theorist, critic, and novelist currently teaching at the University of Chicago.

Film semiotics is the study of sign process (semiosis), or any form of activity, conduct, or any process that involves signs, including the production of meaning, as these signs pertain to moving pictures. Every artform has some hidden symbols in it which is left to the audience to make meanings through it.

Nasrin Rahimieh is a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Male gaze Concept in feminist theory

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and the aesthetic representations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: (i) the perspective of the man behind the camera, (ii) the perspective of the male characters in the filmed story; and (iii) the perspective of the male spectator gazing at the moving image. Moreover, the female gaze is the conceptual analogue of the male gaze.

T. V. Reed is the Buchanan Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English at Washington State University. Reed's scholarship and teaching centers on the politics of cultural forms, and cultural forms of politics, particularly as rooted in social movements. His work has analyzed a wide variety of texts, from literature to film to the World Wide Web to university departments to movements themselves as texts, within a timeframe from the 1930s to the present. This work has included not only the fairly common cultural studies approach of examining the ways in which social trends can be read symptomatically in literature and other cultural forms, but also the equally important, less practiced task of analyzing how cultural forms themselves directly contribute to and are shaped by social movements.

Hybrid novel

The hybrid novel is a form of fiction, characterized by reaching beyond the limits of the anticipated medium through the incorporation of varying storytelling methods, such as poetry, photography, collage, maps, diagrams, and posters. The hybrid novel refers to a broad spectrum of literary work such as the graphic narrative and fusion texts.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Garrett Stewart". The University of Iowa Department of English. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 "Reading for the Apparatus: An Interview with Garrett Stewart". The University of Iowa Department of English. Retrieved September 18, 2019.
  3. Stewart, Garrett (1990). Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. University of California Press.
  4. Rayner, Keith; Pollatsek, Alexander (1994). The Psychology of Reading. Psychology Press.
  5. Stewart, Garrett (1990). Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext . University of California Press. p.  63.
  6. Stewart, Garrett (1999). Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis. University of Chicago Press.
  7. Stewart, Garrett (2007). Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. University of Chicago Press.