Bandwidths

Reviews / Votes

Here is a volume of writing about voices, faces, sentences, songs, paintings, spelling, mirrors, reading, technology, time, and other objects of considerable interest. How could one evoke and study such diverse matters without getting lost? We may not know the answer, but this book does. Its themes divide but its many roads keep meeting. Language is not only a medium but a source of light. A film looks out at its viewer and back at the material it is made of. No one splits hairs here, but many of the writers like to split words. The result isn't always immediately intelligible, but it is always, to borrow an example from Garrett Stewart, intel/legible. An amazing work of critical theory and practice. * Michael Wood, Professor Emeritus of English, Princeton University, USA * Garrett Stewart's longtime readers will be familiar with a feeling of pleasant incredulity: how can anyone read this widely and always this well? In gathering an A-team of equally intense critics around him, Bandwidths offers something else almost beyond belief: a dazzling group intellectual experience that is also intensely moving-a snapshot of literary and cultural criticism at its collective best. * David Kurnick, Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA * With the vast philosophical erudition and rigorous analytical skills that are his trademark, David LaRocca here brilliantly introduces Garrett Stewart's unique body of readings and writings, 'across media,' while bringing together an original and reasoned set of critical interventions by distinctive commentators (all specialists in their respective fields). What results is a groundbreaking and wide-ranging work, an intellectual adventure of dazzling intensity, that is bound to become a standard reference for any future engagement with-and further elaboration of-Stewart's 'inter-medial' approach and the refreshing insights and methods it continues to inspire and effect in literary and historical investigations of modern narrative and poetics, as well as in contemporary visual arts and media studies. * Hent de Vries, Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities, New York University, USA *