Matthew Gannon

Biography

I teach courses on modern British, Irish, and Caribbean literature here at Holy Cross. My research is concerned with the interconnections between literature's artistic significance and its political, historical, and philosophical dimensions. My doctoral research, completed at Boston College, focused in particular on Wyndham Lewis, Hope Mirrlees, and Virginia Woolf alongside modernist aesthetic philosophy, political-economic theory, and psychoanalytic thought. My research has been published in CLCWeb, differences, and several edited collections; my academic reviews have appeared in Modern Language Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Mediations; and I have written on politics and popular culture for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, and Tribune. My current research increasingly focuses on the weird, the speculative, and the unnatural in modern literature. I incorporate these interests in my literature courses, which also include films and visual artworks as well as contemporary ecocriticism and writings on the Anthropocene.

Selected Publications

“Inversion.” Co-written with Tavid Mulder. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. (forthcoming)

“Adorno as a Reader: Writing the Mediation of Literature and Philosophy.” Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading: A Critical Conversation, edited by Stephen Ross, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

“The Aesthetic Death Drive of Modernism.” differences, vol. 31, no. 2, 2020, pp. 58–85.

“The Kafkaesque in the Trial of George Bluth.” A State of Arrested Development: Critical Essays on the Innovative Television Comedy, edited by Kristin M. Barton, McFarland, 2015.