Retired professor of Humanities and Creative Writing, York University died at home on September 12, 2024 with his wife and sons at his side. Matthew died on his own terms due to complications of Parkinson’s Disease. He leaves behind his beloved wife Kathleen (Flynn), sons Liam and Eamonn, and brother Michael (Sandra Nimigon). He loved teaching and estimated that he taught nearly 5000 students during his tenure as a teacher.
Matthew was born in Dublin and immigrated to Toronto with his mother at age ten. His father, a drummer with the Royal Irish Fusiliers, died two months before Matthew was born.
Matthew attended St. Michael’s College School and then obtained degrees from the University of Toronto (philosophy) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (Ph.D. in Modern Literature).
He taught at SUNY Binghamton and York University where he inaugurated and directed creative writing programs and taught courses in Modern European literature and thought. His teaching and scholarly interests served as the foundation for his exploration of the themes in The Reichkanzler’s Historian. The novel, which took over 30 years to research and complete, aspires to be both a literary work and a genuine history of the times. It is a meditation on history and the psychological complexities of living under a totalitarian regime.
His critical writings and short fiction have appeared in numerous international journals. In addition to The Reichskanzler’s Historian he has written a second novel, Mildred Dunsfield, set in nineteenth-century Ontario, a collection of shortstories, two books of poems, and a study of Virginia Woolf entitled A Tormented Life: Virginia Woolf and her Lifelong Struggles with Failure. The study, subtitled Towards an Anatomy of Failure, deals with the phenomenon of human failure, utilizing the life and work of this writer. Samples of these can be found on his website matthewcorrigan.ca.
Matthew considered himself a cultural anthropologist, interested in the transformations of human consciousness and culture and the ways that art reflects, illuminates, and counters its age—often performing critiques upon the age. He was interested in how the significant artist will often reorient himself “posthumously,” as Nietzsche puts it, within his age, working clandestinely and subversively to accomplish his or her best work. And he was interested in the problem of evil as it reached apocalyptic pitch in the previous century—“an age of monsters,” as Czeslaw Milosz aptly called it.
He was inspired by Nietzsche’s idea that one must live one’s life bravely; that one must strike out for what is right and just in this world; that one must serve the future as well as the present; and that one has an obligation to the young to open their eyes to the marvels and mistakes of the past. He tried to follow Burckhardt’s injunction that one should be both a specialist and a generalist in as many areas as possible, lest one become, in Burckhardt’s words, a “barbarian.” He related to Gide’s observation that one becomes a writer or indeed teacher to reprise for others what one has received from one’s own usually deceased mentors; and identified with van Gogh’s humble credo: “The word artist includes the meaning: always seeking without absolutely finding. . . . As far as I know the word means I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”
A private service will be held.
Online memories and condolences may be shared at www.peacefultransition.ca