The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors

Reviews / Votes

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 *