Patrick Redding
I am interested in the conceptual implications of literary form and in the way that literature responds to cultural struggles, philosophical problems, and historical crises. 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 literary 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.
Introduction to American Literature
American Modernism
American Literature after 1945
Fitzgerald and Hemingway
American Poetry
Reading and Writing Literature in the Digital Era
Bachelor of Arts, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Thinking Outside the Box of Modernist Time”
MSA Forum on Teaching Modernist Poetry, ed. Emily Setina, Modernism/Modernity (forthcoming
in 2016)
“‘One must make a distinction, however’: Marianne Moore and Democratic Taste”
Twentieth-Century Literature 58:3 (Summer 2012): 296-332.
“Everyday Nobility: Stevens and the Paradoxes of Democratic Heroism”
Special Issue on “Stevens and the Everyday,” The Wallace Stevens Journal 36:1 (Spring
2012): 23-46
“Whitman Unbound: Democracy and Poetic Form, 1912-1931”
New Literary History 41:3 (Summer 2010): 669-690