Matthew Redmond
Stanford University
Program in Writing and Rhetoric
POSITIONS HELD
2021-2022. Instructor. Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Stanford University.
EDUCATION
Stanford University, Stanford, California: Ph.D., English Literature, 2021. M.A., English Literature, 2017.
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec: M.A., English Literature, 2015.
B.A., First Class Honors and Dean’s Honor List, English Literature, 2013 (Minor: History).
DISSERTATION
Living Too Long: The Politics of Lifespan in American Literature
Directed by Gavin Jones (co-chair), Alex Woloch (co-chair), Denise Gigante, and Nancy Ruttenburg.
My dissertation finds that nineteenth-century American literature and culture organized itself around the fear of living too long. This fear manifests most strikingly in a character type that I call the extant figure: someone who disrupts their environment by refusing to die when expected, their lifespan stretching past the limits of one historical moment and into another where they cannot fully belong. In the extant figure’s struggles we may observe a young republic anxiously predicating its continued survival on the concept of timely generational succession, and dreading the possibility of that system breaking down when one generation overextends its reach; an effort to reconcile, or else to transcend, religious and secular models of time, with their different implications for human life; and several successive generations learning to conceive of their own existence as historically embedded.
PUBLISHED WORK
Book Chapters (refereed)
“Book-Time in Charles Lamb and Washington Irving.” Romanticism and Time: Literary Temporalities. Edited by Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021. 145-62.
Journal Articles (refereed)
“Without the Power to Die: Dickinson’s Longevity.” English Literary History 89.2 (2022): 437-62.
“Living Too Long: Republican Time in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 77.1 (2022): 29-55.
“Rip Van Winkle’s Coat: Inheriting the American Republic.” Textes et Contextes 17.1 (2022).
“If Bird or Devil: Meta-Plagiarism in ‘The Raven.’” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 19.1 (2018): 88-103.
“Trouble in Paradise: The Picturesque Fictions of Irving and His Successors.” ESQ 62.1 (2016): 1-37.
Book Reviews
“Review of Adulthood and Other Fictions, by Sari Edelstein.” In the Journal of American Studies 55.4 (2021): 976-77.
“Review of Someone Somewhere, by Dana Mills.” In The Bull Calf Review 5.2 (2015), McGill University.
“Review Siege 13, by Tamas Dobozy.” In The Bull Calf Review. 4.2 (2014), McGill University.
“Review of Conflict, by Christine McNair.” In The Bull Calf Review 3.3 (2014), McGill University.
Public Writing
“The Birth of Immortality.” [Forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books.]
Magnificent Wreck: Samuel Taylor Coleridge at 250. [Forthcoming in Public Books.]
“What’s The Crown Without a Living Queen Elizabeth II?” Literary Hub. November 7, 2022.
“What’s the Point of a Prequel When We All Know Things End Badly?” Literary Hub. September 30, 2022.
“Edgar Allen Poe Needs a Friend.” Lapham’s Quarterly. September 7, 2021.
“Why Should We Read Unfinished Novels?” Literary Hub. January 22 2021.
“Emily Dickinson is the unlikely hero of our time.” The Conversation. August 26 2020.
[Adapted and republished by Actively Learn as test material for 12th-grade students]
Podcasts
Contributor. “Stuffed: Taxidermy in the History of America.” Backstory. November 23 2018. https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/stuffed/
Blogs
Contributor. “Finding Bleak House in Martin Chuzzlewit.” Dickens Society Blog. April 24 2017. https://dickenssociety.org/archives/1599
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Instructor and Course Designer, Stanford University
“Act Your Age: The Rhetoric of Childhood, Adulthood, and Beyond.”
Fall, Winter, and Spring 2022.
In this course, students will analyze the many ways that we use language to create, maintain, and even gatekeep categories of age—but also to subvert and transform them. In our classroom conversations and research projects, I welcome every imaginable topic and perspective related to our rhetorical encounters with the concept of age. You could explore the representation of youth in shows like Stranger Things or songs like Taylor Swift’s “22”; the meaning of millennials’ anxious fascination with “adulting”; the self-fashioning of Generation Z through platforms like TikTok; or the rhetoric of experts like biologist Dr. David Sinclair, whose book Lifespan (2019) forecasts the end of aging itself. Through classroom discussion, exercises, and interconnected essay assignments, we will explore the power that language affords all of us to define the unfolding of our lives.
“Good Old Days: The Rhetoric of Nostalgia.”
Fall, Winter, and Spring 2021.
This course invites students to think deeply about the innumerable uses of nostalgia. Drawing on a wide range of textual sources, we study the structure and effect of different appeals to former times, thereby learning strategies for enhancing our own rhetorical technique. Through classroom discussion, exercises, and assignments focused on the rhetoric of nostalgia, we practice thinking about the past not as a fixed structure that we merely gesture toward, but as one that all of us construct, piece by piece, with our language.
“Unfinished Novels.” Fall 2020, Fall 2018.
Few species of writing are more exquisitely uncomfortable than a novel that is not, and never will be, finished. Closely reading works by Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Dickens, along with select critical interpretations, this course invites participants to ask: what do unfinished novels reveal to us that finished ones cannot? What peculiar insights do they give us into the processes and pressures of literary production? And what exactly is our role in consuming them?
Teaching Assistant, Stanford University
“Steinbeck.” Gavin Jones. Spring 2018.Led two weekly sections, met with students, graded all papers and exams, and gave a lecture on the cannibalism of genre.
“Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, Fitzgerald.” Gavin Jones. Winter 2017. Led two weekly sections, met with students, graded all papers and exams, and gave a lecture on Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.
“Development of the Short Story: Continuity and Innovation.” Elizabeth Tallent. Spring 2016. Led one weekly section, graded all papers and exams, and gave a lecture on Hemingway’s style.
RESEARCH AND TEACHING FIELDS
Rhetoric and Communication; Nineteenth-century American literature; Biopolitics; Influence and Intertextuality; Literary Transhistory; Narrative Theory; Nationalism and Citizenship; Victorian Literature and Culture; Herman Melville; Emily Dickinson; Charles Dickens
FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS
Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022)
MSCA Seal of Excellence (2022)
Robert B. Partlow, Jr. Prize, Dickens Society (2020)
- For “Beyond the Attic: Dickens and Little Women”
Pigott Scholars Program Fellowship (2018)
Graduate Fellowship, Stanford University (2015-2021)
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship (2015)
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada M.A. Canada Graduate Scholarship (2014)
Molson Graduate Award in English, McGill University (2014)
FQRSC Graduate Award, McGill University (2014)
Mary Keenan Scholarship, McGill University (2013)
Glorianna Martineau Fellowship, McGill University (2013)
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS AND INVITED TALKS (SELECTED)
“No Country for Old Men: Age and the American Republic.” “Autres lieux du politiques / Littérature et politiques.” University of Lille. February 2022.
“Without the Power to Die: Dickinson’s Longevity.” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting. April 2021.
“Beyond the Attic: Dickens and Little Women.” #Dickens150: A Virtual Conference. British Association for Victorian Studies. June 2020.
“Book-Time in Washington Irving and Charles Lamb.” Dickens Winter Conference. UCLA. 2019.
“Thought-Clocks in Irving and Lamb.” French Society for the Study of English Romanticism. Université de Lille. November 2018.
“‘Bracebridge Hall’ and the Defense of Christmas.” American Literature Association Annual Meeting. May 2018.
“Martin Chuzzlewit: A Source for Melville’s ‘Bartleby?’” Eleventh International Melville Conference. King’s College, London. June 2017.
ACADEMIC SERVICE
Editorial Work
Assistant Editor. Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia. Edited by Patricia Parker, Trey Jansen, et al. http://shakespeare-encyclopedia.stanford.edu
Committees and Organizations
Contributor. Program in Writing and Rhetoric Newsletter Committee.
Co-organizer. Stanford English Department Working Group. 2018-2020.
Teaching Mentor. Writing Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) Program. 2019-2020.
Graduate Student Representative. Stanford English Department Admissions Committee. 2018.
Co-organizer. Berkeley/Stanford English Conference. April 2016.
LANGUAGES
English – Native
French – Fluent – Written and Spoken
Italian – Beginner – Written
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
American Literature Association
American Comparative Literature Association
International Melville Society
Dickens Society
Modern Language Association