Attention Spans

David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of more than a dozen books, including The Geschlecht Complex (Bloomsbury 2022), Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind (Bloomsbury 2021), and Inheriting Stanley Cavell (Bloomsbury 2020). He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York College at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University.Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa, USA, having previously held teaching appointments at Boston University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford University, Princeton University, and the Universities of London (Queen Mary), Konstanz, and Fribourg (Switzerland). He is the author of 18 books, including Novel Violence (2009), which was awarded the Perkins Prize for the best book on narrative (International Society for the Study of Narrative), and Between Film and Screen (1999), which was a short-listed finalist for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. In 2010 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• An Introduction in Retrospect / David LaRoccaInventory as Itinerary / Garrett StewartTexTcerpts / Garrett StewartI. Dickens as Prompt Text1 / Trials – and Test SitesDickens and the Trials of Imagination (1974)2 / Death Sentencing and Narrative ParoleDeath Sentences: Styling of Dying in British Fiction (1984)II. Reading In, Reading Out3 / Literary GraphonicsReading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (1990)4 / Re: Reading Under AddressDear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1996)III. Discipline Bridging5 / From Imprint to Motion PictureBetween Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis (1999)6 / Pages Painted, Writing WithdrawnThe Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (2006)7 / From Celluloid to DigitimeFramed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (2007)IV. Convergences: Mediation Revisited8 / Mapping the Narrative SubstrateNovel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (2009)9 / Reading Foreclosed/Text ReinventedBookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (2011)10 / The Narrative Optics of SurveillancinemaClosed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance (2015)V. Medium, Philosophy, Concept11 / Textual Act as ContractThe Deed of Reading: Literature * Writing * Language * Philosophy (2015)12 / Material Transference and Medial MergerTransmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (2017)VI. Reading Style/Styles of Reading13 / Verbal Expenditures, Narrative DividentsThe Value of Style in Fiction (2018)14 / The Dickens Page, In and Out LoudThe One, Other, and Only Dickens (2018)15 / Bookhood in EvolutionBook, Text, Medium: Cross-Sectional Reading for a Digital Age (2020)VII. Kinetic Textuality16 / Cinemachination and the Legible ApparatusCinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method (2020)17 / Museum ScreensCinesthesia: Museum Cinema and the Curated Screen (2021)18 / Toward a Cinematographic SentenceThe Ways of the Word: Episodes in Verbal Attention (2022)VIII. Audiovisual Mirrors: Screening Text and Voice19 / Reflex ReadingThe Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors: Reflex Action in Fiction and Film (2022)20 / The Legible VoiceStreisand: The Mirror of Difference (2023)IX. AudiopticsX. CoverageA Dialogue on Critical ConversationTerms of Use: Coinagse Cashed Out – A Selective GlossaryTimelines: A Topographical BibliographyAcknowledgmentsContributors

A critic of Garrett Stewart’s brilliance and scope deserves a 'Reader,' but this fascinating book is far more than a collection of an author’s most salient articles. A 'writing journal' of a teaching career that incorporates brief extracts of important books in the inspiring narrative of an immensely wide-ranging critical practice, Attention Spans engages the major developments of recent criticism. A tour de force.