After that, he accepted a joint appointment in the English department and received an endowed chair, the Decker Professorship in the Humanities, in 1984.

Irwin's first book of literary criticism, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1975.

This was followed by his first book of poems, The Heisenberg Variations, under his pen name John Bricuth, published by the University of Georgia Press in 1976.

In 1980 he published his second book of literary criticism and scholarship, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance, with the Yale University Press, and in 1994 he published his third book of criticism, Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges.

His latest book, a narrative poem published by Johns Hopkins University press in 2005, is titled, As Long As It's Big.