Garrett Stewart

Garrett Stewart
Nationality	American
Education
Alma mater	Yale University (MA, PhD) University of Southern California (BA)
Philosophical work
Institutions	The University of Iowa
Language	English
Main interests	Victorian literature Film theory Stylistics Narratology Formalism Textual Poetics Media studies Visuality Studies Poststructuralism Deconstruction
Notable works	Reading Voices, Between Film and Screen
Notable ideas	Subvocalization, Narratography

Garrett Stewart 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.

Across his career, Stewart has pursued a formalist methodology of intense close-reading in the medium of print, film, and (most recently) conceptual art. He describes his own work as existing at the intersection of stylistics and narrative theory. Examining the ways in which the larger structures of plot are operative at even the smallest of scales prompted Stewart to coin the term "narratography"—i.e., the way in which narrative is written, whether in terms of stylistics (print) or editing/montage (film), from the ground-up.

In his 1990 book Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Stewart argues that literature is not primarily a visual medium but an aural one. He draws on the neurophysiological phenomenon of "subvocalization" to suggest that literary poetics (including slippages in meaning) are ignited by the "voice" that a reader lends to the text. Subvocalization is 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 cognitive load and that meaning depends as much on the way words "sound" in the Internal monologue as it does the words' visual (Typography) arrangement.

In his 2000 book Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis, Stewart draws on ideas in film theory, specifically screen theory and its emphasis on the cinematic apparatus, to argue that as an art form cinema is haunted by its basis in photography. While cinema generates the illusion of time and movement, and thus the "live bodies" that appear on the screen, this is made possible by a linear procession of singular photographs on the filmstrip which, as theorists such as Roland Barthes and Laura Mulvey have pointed out, are themselves evocative of stillness and death. Stewart is interested in the ways in which this stillness intrudes or impinges upon the forward movement of the film projector, and the plot, that would otherwise repress it. In this respect, Stewart advances a media theory that views different forms of narrative plotting (e.g., genre, flashback, dissolve, etc.) as symptoms or sublations of their material mode of production. Changing the technological basis of film ought to therefore generate different kinds of plots and cinematic styles. So much is Stewart's contention in a follow-up book, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (2007), in which he argues that digital filmmaking is equally affected by the logic of the pixel array (rather than the linear celluloid strip), leading to the kind of liquid, internally-morphing representations of time evident in, for example, Steven Spielberg Minority Report and the The Wachowskis The Matrix.