Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext

by Garrett Stewart

"At last, a scrupulous and sustained--'earsighted'--study of that shadowy yet vital intersection of sound and sense without which literary reading remains a disembodied exercise. . . . Stewart immerses us brilliantly in the poststructural method of a 'phonemic' analysis."--Geoffrey H. Hartman, author of Saving the Text  "Stunningly articulate. . . . Alongside brilliant exegeses of passsages from the major English poets, Stewart offers new and dazzling interpretations of the 'poetics of prose' in such novelists as Dickens, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The book is a tour de force, no doubt about it. In my opinion, Reading Voices will have not only a wide but a lasting reception."--Hayden White, author of Metahistory  "This is exciting, virtuoso work in a playfully imaginative hermeneutic mode. Stewart's ear hears fascinating and compelling things, things which have a delightfully rich and thematically complex bearing on much larger textual issues."--Paul Fry, author of The Reach of Criticism  "A truly original book. . . . The first work in years to bring together linguistically informed criticism with more philosophically oriented literary theory. The resulting vision of literature is odd, personal, passionate, even outlandish. Not only is Stewart himself and extraordinary stylist, but his work suggests a breakthrough in stylistic criticism so radical as to revitalize the entire field."--Jay Clayton, author of Romantic Vision and the Novel

352 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 1990

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Garrett Stewart writes densely but never without a signature flair – and a willingness to risk the transverbal slip. Fielding texts from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman to Finnegans Wake and poetry from William Shakespeare to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stewart is at his most convincing when taking on Derridean deconstruction and Virginia Woolf's The Waves. If hopping aboard an argument that "contemplates a sensory – encroached upon a cognitive – processing of texts whose intermittent inevitability says nothing about the prevalence, feasibility, or likely force of its recognition" (27) strikes your fancy, then give this a whirl. If those are all so many nonsensical words to you then pass it up easily; there's more poetic life in a line of Woolf's prose than hopeful meaning to a theory that does nothing for you.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 2 out of 5]

不知所云. 沒心情在這種書上浪費時間.
After my professor's explanation, I actually start to appreciate the smartness of this writing. I'll put it back to "to-read" list and finish it up this summer.