Garrett Stewart

Garrett Stewart
Born	(1945-01-05) January 5, 1945
Nationality	American
Education
Alma mater	Yale University (MA, PhD) University of Southern California (BA)
Philosophical work
Institutions	University of California, Santa Barbara University of Iowa
Language	English
Main interests	Victorian literature Film theory Stylistics Narratology Formalism Textual Poetics Media studies Visuality Studies Conceptual art Poststructuralism Deconstruction
Notable works	Reading Voices, Between Film and Screen
Notable ideas	Subvocalization, Phonotext, Narratography

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.

Career

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

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 in 2007 to develop 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. He describes narratography as "searching out the 'microplots' of narrative development in the inflections of technique, audiovisual or linguistic".

Work and main ideas

In his 1990 book Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Stewart argues that literature is not exclusively a visual medium but also an aural one. He draws on the neurophysiological phenomenon of "subvocalization" to suggest that literary poetics (including slippages in meaning) can be ignited by the "voice" that a reader lends to the text—what Stewart calls the "phonetic undertow of literary writing". 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 the cognitive load on working memory, and that meaning depends as much on the way words "sound" in the reader's mind as it does the words' visual (typographical) arrangement. Studying this "phonotext", including potential liaisons between verbal segments that are visually distinct, opens up new inroads for literary analysis. For instance, when Shakespeare's Juliet asks "What's in a name?", acoustically she also asks "What sin a name?" Stewart argues that our habitual, vision-centric reading habits cause us to be "deaf" to these permutations.

In his 2000 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 photography. While cinema generates the illusion of time and movement, and thus the "presence" of live bodies that appear on-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 claimed, 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 plot that would otherwise repress it. In this respect, Stewart advances a media theory that views different forms of narrative technique (e.g., montage, flashback, dissolve, even genre) as symptoms or sublations of their 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, The Matrix (1999) or Spielberg's Minority Report (2002).

Stewart has published numerous other books, ranging from language in 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 conceptual art (e.g., Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art [2011] and Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art [2017]). 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.