‘It's all there in the language’—a conversation with Garrett Stewart

Abstract

AbstractWhat does a famed literary theorist have to say about the interaction between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’? Well, if he's Garrett Stewart, the celebrated agent of pyrotechnic style in the service of durable insights across disparate disciplines and media, then we have much reason to lean in and listen. Stewart is the author of 20 books that range with uncanny competency across Victorian narrative, contemporary American fiction, written auralities, poetics and prose stylistics, cinematic evolution from silver oxide to screen pixel, book art, scenes of reading in painting, and most recently, the vocal drama of Barbra Streisand. The distances between his disciplinary terrains are as vast as his close readings of them are coordinated and trenchant. Here, sitting down before a shared conversational canvas, Stewart fields questions from David LaRocca, who asks how he, if he, thinks about the program of literature and philosophy. LaRocca, editor of the recent Attention Spans: Garrett Stewart, a Reader (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the forthcoming Bandwidths: Reading Across Media with Garrett Stewart (Bloomsbury), tracks the urgency of our moment—in which literature and philosophy are independently besieged and yet may concede little rapprochement. Where does philosophy happen in literature (a philosopher's question) is turned around by Stewart such that we see literature conjuring philosophy at the level of the sentence. We are not peering ‘in’ so much as looking ‘at’ the art of literature teaching philosophy through refined reading and the analytical inquest of the syllable and the sayable. Anyone who works at the fraught fissure of these realms will benefit from the ways Stewart makes literature and philosophy sensible to one another—even as he productively unsettles the terms and conditions of their affiliation.