Prof. Patrick Redding

Assistant Professor

I have been an assistant professor in the English Department since 2010.

In my classes and scholarly work, I try to show how literary writing embeds within its structures of organization (diction, syntax, genre, plot, etc.) premises about language and the world with far-reaching political and philosophical consequences. I read literary works as resources for deliberating about the possibilities and limits of individual knowledge and collective action, and try to describe how these works initiate or respond to major shifts in intellectual and cultural history.  More specifically, I am interested in how liberal democracy gives rise to distinct technologies of literary representation in 20th century American literature, including poetic free verse, vernacular fiction, muckraking journalism, documentary film, and modernist abstraction and collage.  My work tries to address problems at the intersections of several academic fields--literary studies, intellectual history, and political theory--as a way to understand a set of interrelated cultural phenomena in all their aesthetic richness and historical complexity.

My current research project, "Democracy as a Way of Life: American Poetry and Cultural Criticism from Whitman to Williams" considers the relation of experimental verse to the social and intellectual thought of the Progressive and New Deal eras, especially among figures who lived and wrote in Greenwich Village.  This project traces an American intellectual tradition stretching from Walt Whitman to John Dewey that extends the evaluative criteria of democracy—especially the norm of equality—to a remarkably wide range of jurisdictions within public and private life, including sexual relations, the economic system, labor practices, educational methods, and artistic production and consumption.  I explore how this holistic approach to political values—the comprehensive ambition for “democratic totality”—impacted a range of American poets (Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes).  Within this configuration of American poets and intellectuals, the politics of modernist writing appear neither fascist nor anarchic, as scholars often suppose, but profoundly, perhaps excessively, democratic.

Several articles from this project have been published recently, and several more will appear soon.  A article-length survey of democratic ideologies of poetic form appeared in New Literary History in 2010.  A piece on the paradoxes of democratic heroism is scheduled to appear this year in a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal on "Stevens and the Everyday," and another on Marianne Moore's idea of democratic taste is forthcoming from Twentieth-Century Literature in 2013.  In 2012, I will be giving several papers based on my research: in January, at the Modern Language Association annual conference in Seattle; in March, at a conference on "Modernist Manhattan" at the New York Institute of Technology; in late March, a library lecture at M'ville; and in November, at the 5th annual conference of the Society of U.S. Intellectual History.  I am planning to participate in a seminar at the Modernist Studies Association conference in November and to give a paper on "Hannah Arendt and American Literature" at next year's MLA in Boston.

At Manhattanville, I teach a range of courses on American literature, including "Introduction to American Literature," "American Modernism," "American Literature after 1945," "American Poetry," and "Major Modern Authors: Fitzgerald and Hemingway."  I also offer classes on 20th century British literature and reading literature in a digital environment.  In the Fall of 2011, I debuted a new course entitled, "Text, Image, Sound, Web: Imagining Media in 20th c. American Literature," which focused on theories of remediation, mixed-media documentary, novels that incorporate marginal drawings and email, graphic novels, and born-digital narratives.

In all of my classes, I try to impart the value of slow, scrupulous, sensitive reading and clear, logical, precise writing.  My assignments are usually geared towards comparative analysis (between styles, historical periods, analytic concepts, or media formats) with the aim of generating an awareness of fine-grained distinctions and persistent continuities over time and space.  I approach teaching as a theatrical performance that can model habits of alertness, convey the joys of imaginative discovery, and embody the rewards of sustained reflection.  The immediate goal is to speak eloquently and argue convincingly about writers with a genius for the English language; the broader aim is to better read ourselves and the world around us in the past, present, and future. 

I believe literature can generate enduring examples of existential identification (and disidentification), deliver distinct forms of pleasures not found in other forms of media or technology, and stir us into a more pronounced historical self-consciousness.  As a teacher and lover of American literature (who is nonetheless aware of the limits of the categories "American" and "literature"), I hope to contribute to a better informed and more articulate democratic citizery.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications:

"Whitman Unbound: Democracy and Poetic Form, 1912-1931," New Literary History 41:3 (Summer 2010): 669-90.

Review of Milton A. Cohen, Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s (Univ. of Alabama Press, 2010) in The Wallace Stevens Journal 34:2 (Fall 2010): 256-60.