Samuel Coale
Chair, Professor of English
Office: Meneely 311
Office Hours: T, TH 12:30-2:00, 3:30-4:30
Phone: 508-286-3605
Email: scoale@wheatoncollege.edu
Degrees
Ph.D., Brown University
B.A., Trinity College
Main Interests
American Literature, particularly contemporary and pre-Civil War, and contemporary American culture and society.
Research Interests
In the fall of 2007 the course on quantum theory's influences and effects upon contemporary American Fiction was so succesful that it's now a permanent course in the English Department: English 346. The new course connects with Astronomy 130 and Physics 225 in Wheaton's new Connections curriculum. I tried it out as a critical theory for the first time in my recently published article on Joyce Carol Oates, "Psychic Visions and Quantum Physics: Oates' Big Bang and the Limits of Language" (Studies in the Novel, XXXVIII, no. 4, winter 2006, 427-39). I was stunned when Oates e-mailed me: "What a brilliant fascinating essay you have written . . I've read it with much admiration and not a little illumination. I have been interested in the themes you elucidate . . . " I'm thinking of having T-shirts made!
Last summer I gave a paper, "Hawthorne as Early Icon: The Mystery of Silence," at the Hawthorne Conference, "Starting Over," at Bowdoin College in New Brunswick, ME. I am pleased to report that several of us reconstituted Hawthorne's original college drinking society, and by virtue of my experience, wisdom, and great capacity for various spirits, I was unanimously named the Grand Poohbah and am known in such august company as "Papa Doc." Shades of Hemingway in his dotage!
I received a Mellon Grant to look at Don DeLillo's manuscripts at the University of Texas in Austin in November, 2008, at the Harry Ransom Center and discovered his notebooks on quantum theory that underscore my argument about the influence of the theory on his fiction for my new book on quantum theory and contemporary American fiction. I also bought a T-shirt there: "KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD."
The paper, "Hawthorne, Emerson and Darwin: Intelligent Designs?" I presented at the conference on transatlanticism at the Rothermere Institute in Oxford, England, in July, 2006. This helped "re-charge" my interest in Hawthorne for a book on a critical overview of the criticism of his work, due at the publishers in June, 2009. I'm about 1/3 of the way into the book and beginning to feel the pressure. It's turned into a huge, unrelenting, endless project. I delivered a paper at the "Paranoia as Style" session at the MLA in Chicago in December, 2007, on "The X-Files," the "Matrix" movies, "Breach," Zodiac" and Thomas Pynchon's new 1,085-page novel, AGAINST THE DAY. My chapter, "The Entangled Web of James Lee Burke: Heaven's Prisoners in Manichean Prisons," has just been accepted for a book of essays on Burke, and I'm currently writing papers on the cinematic techniques of "Brokeback Mountain" as well as on Hawthorne's unpublished manuscripts.
Teaching Interests
I currently enjoy teaching first-year courses on mysteries, gothic fiction, postmodern fiction--once on the films of Elizabeth Taylor--and Americans Abroad; upper-level courses on all periods of American literature and the English Romantic poets, courses in fiction, single-author senior seminars on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, Dickinson, and Hawthorne, and independent studies and theses on fiction, graphic novels, music blogs, and single authors. This semester there's a thesis on fate in Faulkner, and two students are writing novels. That dark fate has descended--it was always there in the wings--and I'll rise to the great powers of Department Chair for one year, 2009-2010, while the real chair vanishes on a much-needed sabbatical. I hope to double faculty salaries, add a wet bar to the faculty dining room, and write a comic opera featuring willing members of the department.
Other Interests
In December I enjoyed a three-week lecture tour in Japan--to universities and other watering holes in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Kyoto and Narra--speaking on Hawthorne, DeLillo, American culture, Obama's necessary triumph, literary trends and other stuff. Temples and shrines stunned and delighted, and the bath in the hot sulfur springs atop a snowy mountain was to die for. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society is planning a conference in Concord for 2010. Our conference at Bowdoin in the summer of 2008, which I helped engineer and chose the papers for (never end a phrase with a proposition!), was a terrific success.
Currently I am a book reviewer for the Providence Journal and also write theatre, film and books reviews, and feature articles, for the East Side Monthly in Providence, reviewing plays at Trinity Repertory Company and the Gamm Theatre and current films. I'm also an essayist for Trinity Rep and lead after-performance discussions sponsored by the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities. My work has recently taken me to Belarus and Brazil as well as Romania, Poland, India, the Czech Republic, Pakistan and England. If I use "I" one more time, please put me in the stocks on the Dimple, preferably gagged.
Student Projects
Resident Director for 28 Wheaton students abroad in the United Kingdom and Ireland at the Universities of Sussex and Edinburgh, Oxford, the London School of Economics, the University College of Cork, and the BU Internship Program in London; August - December, 2004. A terrific time, living on "The Street" in "Kingston Near Lewes" near the University of Sussex in East Sussex, about twenty minutes north of Brighton. This is part of Wheaton's rapidly expanding Global Education program. And I want to do it again!
Recent projects have included independent studies and Senior Honors Theses on American poets, short stories, William Styron, and others. We met about once a week, the student on her or his own with research and writing, which I help direct and oversee. It's a good deal for both student and teacher, and this kind of independent study thrives at Wheaton.
Selected Publications, Creative Work or Performances
PARADIGMS OF PARANOIA: CONSPIRACY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE AND FICTION was published in 2005. It's the book I've been working on for the past several years, and it's done! It explores the work of such writers as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, Robert Stone, Tim O'Brien, Paul Auster, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and others. As the A. Howard Meneely Professor (1998-2000), I had released time from courses to read and write. Do contemporary writers contribute to or criticize conspiracy theories? What effect do these conspiracies have on American religion, politics and fiction? Is this a new form of American Gothic fiction? And how much of it has permeated our contemporary culture?
I went to Jordan and Lebanon from December 1-12, 2005, to give a series of talks on American ideas of conspiracy, speaking about the Puritan vision of viewing the world in terms of God vs. Satan, the American traditions of evangelical and fundamentist religion, and George W. Bush's role in all of this. It was an astonishing experience that took me to eight universities and study centers, talking with students, faculty, journalists, media folk, Embassy personnel and others. The most exciting part (not really) was riding in a silver, bullet-proofed SUV with two bodyguards in the front seat up the coast of Lebanon to Tripoli. I was also able to visit much of the Bekka Valley, Baalbek, and Tyre, as well as Amman, Beirut and other cities beyond them. I would go back in a flash.
Most recent books include:
The Mystery of Mysteries: Cultural Differences and Designs (2000)
Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (1998)
William Styron Revisited (1991); Paul Theroux (1987); In Hawthorne's Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer (1985), published in paperback as En La Sombra de Hawthorne: El romanticismo americano desde Melville hasta Maiuler (Mexico City, 1988); Anthony Burgess (1981); John Cheever (1977), published in paperback (1984)
The most recent keynote addresses, lectures and papers delivered include "Prelude to Conspiracy: Romanticism and Paranoia" at the Universities of Cordoba and Granada in Spain, November 10 and 12, 2004, "Hawthorne's Sweet Violence: Domains of Spurious Autonomy and Relentless Ambiguity" at the Hawthorne Bicentennnial Conference in Salem, MA, July 3, 2004; "Sacred Origins and/as Endless Texts: The Mystery of the Matrix," Ovidius University, Constanta, Romania, Sept. 19, 2003; "From 'The Awakening' to Titanic: American Culture in the 20th Century" at the 10th International Conference of American Studies in Minsk, Belarus, May, 2000. I also ran two workshop-discussions of Khaled Husseini's The Kite Runner in January, 2005, with Husseini in residence. He told me he found the discussion " surreal."