Office: 352 EPB
  Phone: 319-335-0441
  E-Mail: garrett-stewart@uiowa.edu

• Curriculum Vitae
• Selected Publications/Projects
• Courses
• 18th/19th-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium

Victorian Fiction, Narrative Theory, Textual Poetics, Visuality Studies

James O. Freedman Professor of Letters

In teaching as well as scholarship, I work not only at the crosscurrents of disciplines, theories, and media but at their points of textual undertow.  My book on stylistic registers in Dickens (1974) drew me next to the inner structure and verbal slippages of represented dying in Victorian and modern fiction for Death Sentences (1984).  A linguistic account of subvocal effects in literary writing (Reading Voices, 1990) was then pursued across media into the filmic (or photogrammatic) "undertext" of cinema for Between Film and Screen:  Modernism's Photo Synthesis (1999).  A concern with both the staging of reading and the rhetorical maneuvers of audience address in Victorian fiction (Dear Reader, 1996) has since spread to an adjacent medium.  Turning again to visual textuality (I've come to think of the ongoing approach as "semioptics"), I have attempted a cultural stylistics of the scene of reading in western painting from Rembrandt to Picasso, where formal devices are continually borrowed and redeployed to shore up an image of the inward human subject--or to expose its fractures. My work since has returned to literature and film to develop a medium-specific "narratography" of their different processes.