Bandwidths : Reading Across Media with Garrett Stewart

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.