Closer Reading by Stewart, Garrett; LaRocca, David;

Short description:

Perhaps the most prolific and exacting reader of his generation, Garrett Stewart's first book of essays - on close analysis of novels, literary theory, conceptual art, and cinema - is joined by a new interview that helps account for the range and delicacy of his critical acumen.

Long description:

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In his first book of essays, Garrett Stewart demonstrates and reframes his formidable powers as a close 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 Carrï¿1⁄2. 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.

Table of Contents:

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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 Carrï¿1⁄2'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