Kearney
English

Dutton Kearney

Associate Professor of English

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The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
— Wallace Stevens, The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

Faculty Information

Additional Faculty Information for Dutton Kearney

Education

B.A., University of Texas at Austin, 1991

M.T.S., University of Dallas, 1999

M.A., University of Dallas, 2003

Ph.D., University of Dallas, 2005

Memberships

American Maritain Association

Association of Core Texts and Courses (ACTC)

Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Faculty Representative

Philadelphia Society

Publications

Letterkenny: Tradition Meets Toleration in Television, Lexington Books, 2027.

The Elements of Analysis, co-written with J. A. Jackson. K-12 Press, 2026. 

“Tolerance and Tradition in Letterkenny.” In Better Living Through Television, Rowman and Littlefield Books, 2022, pp. 183-199.

“Swift’s Critique of Philosophical Materialism.” In Jonathan Swift and Philosophy, Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 103-129.

“How to Historicize Thumos: Swift’s The Battel of the Books.” In Jonathan Swift and Philosophy, Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 145-155.

 Gulliver’s Travels, editor. Ignatius Critical Editions: Ignatius Press, 2010.

“Introduction.” Gulliver’s Travels, editor. Ignatius Critical Editions: Ignatius Press, 2010.

 

“Politics and Virtue in Gulliver’s Travels.” Gulliver’s Travels, editor. Ignatius Critical Editions: Ignatius Press, 2010.

“On Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay.’” The Imaginative Conservative. April 27, 2014. (http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/04/44521.html)

“Breaking Bad as Contemporary Tragedy.” The Imaginative Conservative. August 13, 2013. (http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/08/the-tragedy-of-breaking-bad.html)

“Von Balthasar the Transmodernist.” Review Essay in Religion and the Arts, Volume 14, Issue 2 (Summer 2010). This essay was translated into Italian for the Philosophical Culture Quarterly, Kasparhauser (http://www.kasparhauser.net/bald/kearney.html).

“Little in Common”? Law and Literature in Thomas More’s “A Dialogue on Conscience,” Moreana 46: 176 (June, 2009): 77-96.

Biography

I have a Masters in Theological Studies and a Ph.D. in Literature, both from the University of Dallas. I’m interested in interdisciplinary studies that push back against the contemporary tendence to reduce of literature to a “teaching” or a philosophical delivery system. I’m interested in the independent ontology of literature and its relationship to the disciplines of political philosophy, aesthetics, theology, classics, and history. I also like to laugh, and so I find that Jonathan Swift serves me well in all regards.

I am the Director of the Visiting Writers Program, and some of our recent writers have included Ron Rash, Christopher Beha, Hernan Diaz, A. M. Juster, Chigozie Obioma, Dana Gioia, James Matthew Wilson, and Hillsdale’s own, Forrester McClatchey. I also direct our Creative Writing Program, a one semester course taught by Chigozie Obioma.

My wife Janie and I have seven children and, so far, seven grandchildren who create joy wherever they are.