Matthew Schultz

Matthew Schultz is the Director of First-Year Writing & the Writing Center and Adjunct Associate Professor of English. He earned both his B.A. and M.A. in English Literature at John Carroll University and his Ph.D. in English Literature from Saint Louis University where he specialized in Irish Studies, Literary Modernism, and Postcolonial Theory. At Saint Louis University, Dr. Schultz worked as a writing consultant and Assistant Coordinator in the Undergraduate Writing Center and Directed the Graduate Writing Center where he engaged in research on multimodal tutoring and tutor training pedagogies.

His first book of scholarship, Haunted Historiographies: The Rhetoric of Ideology in Postcolonial Irish Fiction identifies and charts a movement in contemporary Irish novels that revisits and revises the partisan architecture of Ireland’s founding mythologies. By juxtaposing canonical and non-canonical texts that complicate previous representations of four definitive events in modern Irish and British history (the Great Famine, the Irish Revolution, World War II, and the Northern Irish Troubles), Schultz demonstrates how the ghost, an anomalous figure, operates as a metacritical trope not for overturning the validity of Nationalist mythologies in favor of Revisionist narratives, but for exposing the process by which such histories are constructed. He continues this examination of haunting in Joycean Arcana: Ulysses and the Tarot de Marseille in which Dr. Schultz situate Joyce within the wider circles of occult modernism to build upon the widely-accepted Homeric framework of Ulysses thereby showing how The Odyssey, as both a divinatory tool and an allegory for the journey of the soul, pairs with images from the tarot to chart a new constellation of experiences within the novel.

Schultz has written several volumes of poetry that examine observation as an oracular event: the deliberate attention to patterns and rhymes in everyday life (images/ideas/language). In his most recently published volume of prose poems, Icaros, he charts an imaginal response to a set of 48 rock songs from the 1960s and 1970s by weaving together their images and themes to create a psychedelic odyssey that roams from Los Angeles to Andromeda, and which considers the intersections among prose and poetry, space and time, imagination and reality, the known and the unknown. Closer to home, his collection of verse poems, Inflorescence, maneuvers through the natural landscapes and neighborhoods of the places he has lived (Cleveland, St. Louis, and the Hudson Valley) even as the poems navigate the memories and expectations of life lived in those places.

Published alongside Icaros, Schulz’s mixed-media memoir, With Ghosts, participates in a haunted literary history alongside Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust’s project is one of involuntary memory that arises from sense perceptions. The protagonist famously recalls—instantly and in great detail—the minutia of his childhood upon tasting a madeleine cake dipped in tea. Proust asks us to see the world of the late 19^th century through the nostalgic longing of his early-20^th-century narrator. À la recherche du temps perdu is a novel obsessed with the subjective process of accessing and making sense of the past. As such, Proust’s novel serves as a point of departure for Schultz’s collection of vignettes that are situated at the intersection of memory and abstraction. Each textual (mis)remembrance is distilled from a childhood event elicited by abstract compositions his son painted while at nursery school.

His most recent project, An Oblique Voice was published by Bottlecap Press in their Features Chapbook Series. This collection plays with the appearance of the oracular as a haunting of images that sabotage reality. For Schultz, the oracular utterance generates aesthetic experiences that attune our awareness to the forms that construct reality. For twenty-two consecutive days while sitting atop Observatory Hill on the campus of Vassar College in New York’s Hudson Valley, Schultz wrote a poem that ties together the images of the Tarot de Marseille and the images that played out in view of Sunset Lake and, further afield, the hills and mountains of the Hudson Highlands.

Schultz’s two novels are primarily concerned with place. The first, On Coventry, is a creative exploration of the past-haunted-present that features a nostalgic protagonist who is at once homesick and sick of home. It is a bildungsroman that traces the very real phenomenon of generational decline by mapping the economic corrosion of Cleveland upon the semi-charmed story of Eliot Hopkins, his working-class parents, and immigrant grandparents. The story of immigration embedded in the text is a found narrative distilled from the notebooks of his great-grandfather who emigrated from Yugoslavia to Cleveland in 1921. Schultz’s second novel, We, The Wanted, charts the diverse mythologies of seemingly disparate folklores—Irish, Haitian, and Native American—that converge beneath the beacon of the Split Rock Lighthouse in Upstate New York as a way of exploring the contemporary phenomena of disenchantment. Shining a light upon the mysterious and tragic history of the American 19^th century and across the tortured generations who weathered its storm, We, The Wanted is an illustrated gothic tale of grim isolation, the consequences of (dis)belief, and the monsters that continue to lurk beyond the pale of civilization.