Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors

With its laser-focus on the verbal and visual infrastructure of narrative <i>The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors </i>is the first sustained comparative study of how image patterns are tracked in prose and cinema. In film examples ranging from <i>Citizen Kane</i> through<i> Apocalypse Now</i> to <i>Blade Runner 2049</i> then on to Christopher Nolan's 2020 <i>Tenet</i> Garrett Stewart follows the shift from celluloid to digital cinema through various narrative manifestations of the image from freeze-frames to computer-generated special effects. By bringing cinema alongside literature Stewart discovers a common tendency in contemporary storytelling in both prose and visual narrative from the ongoing trend of mind-game films to the often puzzling narrative eccentricities of such different writers as Nicholson Baker and Richard Powers-including the latter's eerie mirroring of reader empathy in his 2021 <i>Bewilderment.</i>