Description
Book SynopsisWith its laser-focus on the verbal and visual infrastructure of narrative,
The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors is the first sustained comparative study of how image patterns are tracked in prose and cinema. In film examples ranging from
Citizen Kane through
Apocalypse Now to
Blade Runner 2049, then on to Christopher Nolan's 2020
Tenet, Garrett Stewart follows the shift from celluloid to digital cinema through various narrative manifestations of the image, from freeze-frames to computer-generated special effects. By bringing cinema alongside literature, Stewart discovers a common tendency in contemporary storytelling, in both prose and visual narrative, from the ongoing trend of mind-game films to the often puzzling narrative eccentricities of such different writers as Nicholson Baker and Richard Powersincluding the latter's eerie mirroring of reader empathy in his 2021
Bewilderment.Trade ReviewThe central question of this brilliant, often surprising book is ‘what a text, whether verbal or visual, really has on its
mind’. This ingredient is not the same as what the text says or means or even has in mind. It is what readers and viewers meet when the text talks to itself or about itself, and Professor Stewart leads us through a whole array of films and novels where amazing versions of that talk take place. What’s more, Professor Stewart’s own style actively models the attentive curiosity it recommends. * Michael Wood, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA *
The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors takes the once-exciting notion of the “meta” or “reflexive” text in new and, yes, exciting directions. In demonstrations brilliantly capturing both the immediacy and the takeaway of reception, Stewart shows how the work of art—be it a popular film or novelistic tour de force—is precisely that: an activity, an event, where “reading itself” is paramount and transcendent. * William Galperin, Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA *
With
Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors that peerless verbal acrobat/analyst Garrett Stewart has given us a new feast of words and images, a new experience of “aesthetic bliss” (borrowing from Nabokov) in the “continuing reflexive kick of the metatextual turn.” The “canny linguistic density” he finds in maximalist novelist Richard Powers - one of the book’s principal figures, along with another “sentence-dedicated
writer” minimalist Nicholson Baker and cinematic masters of the reflexive such as Bergman and Fellini - is mirrored in Stewart’s nearly
uncanny attunement to “phrasal intertwine and echo” in the “rhyming poetry of prose itself.” Viscerally engaged with the material presence of words and images, Stewart always lets his thinking be “tested on the pulse of our attention.” The result is that readers will come away from this book with a consciousness of reading and viewing quickened and delighted by a vastly enlarged understanding of their own “contributory work in the energizing of prose” and image. A dazzling performance from a critic whose powers of noticing are nothing short of exhilarating. * Ross Posnock, Anna S. Garbedian Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University, USA *
Table of ContentsPreview: Beveled Planes of Response 1. Picture Shows 2. Cross-Fade to Prose 3. Understories 4. Wording Unbound 5. Writing Unpent 6. Reading: In Decent Exposure
Afterthoughts: The Angle of Incidents Bibliography Index
