The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors: Reflex Action in Fiction and Film

Description

With 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 Powers-including the latter's eerie mirroring of reader empathy in his 2021 Bewilderment.

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.

The 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 *