Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext

Abstract

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).

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