Closer Reading: Garrett Stewart's Essays in Refraction
In his first book of essays, Garrett Stewart demonstrates and reframes his formidable powers as a closer reader of a vast range of texts: novels, films, songs, book art, digital media, and more.

Among the most prolific and exacting readers of his generation, Stewart is renowned for his virtuosic interventions across a number of humanistic fields, including prose narrative, screen studies, and literary theory. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and winner of the International Society for the Study of Narrative's prize for Novel Violence (2009), Stewart draws on these varied realms in his intensive readings of enduring works across media – ones worthy of a re-view and a closer look.

Closer Reading, like Stewart's writing more broadly, offers up-close analyses of novels, poetry, cinema, and conceptual art, including chapters on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Dickens, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Cavell, and John le Carré. A collection a half-century in the making – yet brimming with critical notes from the vanguard – Closer Reading finds Stewart demonstrating, from sentence to sentence, a sustained rethinking of the value of close reading not just as a methodology but also as a cognitive disposition.

Leaving paranoid, symptomatic, and surface reading to the side, Stewart revels in the workings of sentences and the many senses of media. Such a “prismatic reading” affords insight into the spectrum of interpretation and the bent light of interaction, refraction, and diffraction. To dwell in the astute and generous line of Stewart's inquiry is to experience an exhilaration rare in critical commentary. Featuring full-length essays, including still-potent early publications and accompanied by an entirely new and wide-ranging interview with David LaRocca, Closer Reading provides a deep and satisfying critical survey of and immersion in Garrett Stewart's inimitable oeuvre.

1147214693
Closer Reading: Garrett Stewart's Essays in Refraction
In his first book of essays, Garrett Stewart demonstrates and reframes his formidable powers as a closer reader of a vast range of texts: novels, films, songs, book art, digital media, and more.

Among the most prolific and exacting readers of his generation, Stewart is renowned for his virtuosic interventions across a number of humanistic fields, including prose narrative, screen studies, and literary theory. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and winner of the International Society for the Study of Narrative's prize for Novel Violence (2009), Stewart draws on these varied realms in his intensive readings of enduring works across media – ones worthy of a re-view and a closer look.

Closer Reading, like Stewart's writing more broadly, offers up-close analyses of novels, poetry, cinema, and conceptual art, including chapters on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Dickens, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Cavell, and John le Carré. A collection a half-century in the making – yet brimming with critical notes from the vanguard – Closer Reading finds Stewart demonstrating, from sentence to sentence, a sustained rethinking of the value of close reading not just as a methodology but also as a cognitive disposition.

Leaving paranoid, symptomatic, and surface reading to the side, Stewart revels in the workings of sentences and the many senses of media. Such a “prismatic reading” affords insight into the spectrum of interpretation and the bent light of interaction, refraction, and diffraction. To dwell in the astute and generous line of Stewart's inquiry is to experience an exhilaration rare in critical commentary. Featuring full-length essays, including still-potent early publications and accompanied by an entirely new and wide-ranging interview with David LaRocca, Closer Reading provides a deep and satisfying critical survey of and immersion in Garrett Stewart's inimitable oeuvre.

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Closer Reading: Garrett Stewart's Essays in Refraction

Closer Reading: Garrett Stewart's Essays in Refraction

Closer Reading: Garrett Stewart's Essays in Refraction

Closer Reading: Garrett Stewart's Essays in Refraction

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Overview

In his first book of essays, Garrett Stewart demonstrates and reframes his formidable powers as a closer reader of a vast range of texts: novels, films, songs, book art, digital media, and more.

Among the most prolific and exacting readers of his generation, Stewart is renowned for his virtuosic interventions across a number of humanistic fields, including prose narrative, screen studies, and literary theory. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and winner of the International Society for the Study of Narrative's prize for Novel Violence (2009), Stewart draws on these varied realms in his intensive readings of enduring works across media – ones worthy of a re-view and a closer look.

Closer Reading, like Stewart's writing more broadly, offers up-close analyses of novels, poetry, cinema, and conceptual art, including chapters on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Dickens, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Cavell, and John le Carré. A collection a half-century in the making – yet brimming with critical notes from the vanguard – Closer Reading finds Stewart demonstrating, from sentence to sentence, a sustained rethinking of the value of close reading not just as a methodology but also as a cognitive disposition.

Leaving paranoid, symptomatic, and surface reading to the side, Stewart revels in the workings of sentences and the many senses of media. Such a “prismatic reading” affords insight into the spectrum of interpretation and the bent light of interaction, refraction, and diffraction. To dwell in the astute and generous line of Stewart's inquiry is to experience an exhilaration rare in critical commentary. Featuring full-length essays, including still-potent early publications and accompanied by an entirely new and wide-ranging interview with David LaRocca, Closer Reading provides a deep and satisfying critical survey of and immersion in Garrett Stewart's inimitable oeuvre.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798765140260
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 10/02/2025
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 1.11(w) x 1.11(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

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

Table of Contents

Introduction - Reading Prismatically: A Spectrum Analysis
David LaRocca
I. Revisitations
1. Coppola's Conrad: The Repetitions of Complicity
2. The Foreign Offices of British Fiction
3. The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell
II. Renewed Ventures
4. Gerard Manley Hopkins' Phonetic Script
5. Charles Dickens and the Plotting of Punctuation
6. John le Carré's Cinematographic Style
7. Negative Imprints in Conceptual Art
III. Revenant Revisions: "Ghost Reading"
8. Narrative Afterwording: Too Close for Closure
A Dialogue in Diffraction
Garrett Stewart & David LaRocca

Notes on Contributors
Index

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