Degrees

Ph.D., Brown University
B.A., Trinity College

Research Interests

Here’s an update as of July, 2011: Things seem to be happening all at once.  My new book, The Entanglements of Nathaniel Hawthorne, has just been published.  It covers the critical and biographical responses and approaches to the author and his works from the 1840s to contemporary times—and took forever.  But it’s finished – which has led to a fourth Hawthorne book for me, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Christopher Diller in the Approaches to Teaching series of the Modern Language Association.  I’ll be on sabbatical from January through August, 2012, to work on this book.

Quirks of the Quantum:  Postmodernism and Contemporary American Fiction, which arose out of a course I began to teach in 2007 on quantum theory’s influences and effects upon contemporary American Fiction, has just gone through the editing process and will be published next year.  The book is partly based on the notes, notebooks, and manuscripts of Don DeLillo at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin where I went with the support of a Mellon Grant.  I bought a great T-shirt there:  “KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD.” The new course, English 346--originally titled “Sex, Lies, and Quantum Theory” to attract students and then admitting that the lie was that there was no sex in the course--is part of Wheaton’s Connections curriculum, connecting with Astronomy 130 and Physics 225.  “Quantum Flux and Narrative Flow: Don DeLillo’s Entanglements with Quantum Theory” was published in Papers on Language and Literature in August, 2011, and was more or less an extension of “Psychic Visions and Quantum Physics:  Oates’ Big Bang and The Limits of Language,” which came out in a special issue on Joyce Carol Oates in Studies in the Novel in 2006.  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 still thinking of having T-shirts made.

The article, “Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Politics and Fiction: The Mouse and the Snake, “commissioned by the leading journal Dialogi in Slovenia, is coming out momentarily.  My Slovenian sucks, but I hear the translator is really good.

Recent articles/chapters in books include “Interview with Walter Mosley, January, 1999,” in Conversations with Walter Mosley, edited by Owen E. Brady, “Bridges of Entanglement and Bewilderment: John Cheever Through the Lens of Language” in Critical Insights: John Cheever, edited by Robert Morace, and “The Entangled Web of James Lee Burke:  Heaven’s Prisoners in Manichean Prisons” in A Violent Conscience: Essays on the Fiction of James Lee Burke, edited by Leonard Engel.  Entanglement is a quantum concept, which suggests that everything is entangled with everything else in the sub-atomic realm, and nothing exists separately in its own right.

Recent papers read include “A Space for Sex:  ‘Brokeback Mountain’ After ‘Taking Woodstock,’” in the Film and Literature section of the American Literature Association’s Convention in Boston last May, “Hawthorne’s Concord: Staging Places” at the Hawthorne Conference in Concord in June, 2010, and “Hawthorne’s Creative Nonfiction: The World, the Way, and the Wonder” at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in December, 2009.

I’m currently working on a paper to present at the Hawthorne, Poe, and Emerson Conference in Florence, Italy, in June, 2012, as well as helping to organize the conference.

Teaching Interests

This fall semester I’ll be teaching a First Year Seminar, “Into the Wild: Americans in Alien Territory,” beginning with Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild about Chris McCandless’ fatal journey into the Alaskan Bush and other novelists such as Paul Theroux, Joan Didion,  Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, Robert Stone, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O’Brien, Philip Roth, John Fowles, and Don DeLillo.  The two other courses include ENG 346, the quantum one, and ENG 232 on English Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron.  That’ll keep me off the streets for awhile – and I won’t be working on a book, or two of them, simultaneously.  Yahoo!

I enjoy teaching first-year courses on mysteries, gothic fiction, postmodern fiction--once on the films of Elizabeth Taylor--upper-level courses on all periods of American literature, and the English Romantic poets, courses in fiction, single-author senior seminars on William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Don DeLillo, and independent studies and theses on fiction, graphic novels, music blogs, and single authors. I served as Department Chair for one year, 2009-2010, while the real chair vanished on a much-needed sabbatical. I hoped to double faculty salaries, add a wet bar to the faculty dining room, and write a comic opera featuring willing members of the department.  I failed in all respects but kept the machinery well oiled and running.

Other Interests

In December, 2008, 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. I’ve also been a book reviewer for the Providence Journal for more years than I wish to conjure up, and also write theatre, film, 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. 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.

Publications

Paradigms Of Paranoia: Conspiracy In Contemporary American Culture And Fiction was published in 2005. 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 fundamentalist 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.  This was the American idea of a low profile on the main highway the length of the Mediterranean up the coast from Beirut to Tripoli: we gleamed in raw sunlight like the perfect target!  I was also able to visit much of the Bekka Valley, Baalbek, and Tyre, as well as Amman 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); hardback and paperback.

Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (1998); paperback in 2000.

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)

Some keynote addresses and/or lectures at conferences abroad include "Prelude to Conspiracy: Romanticism and Paranoia" at the Universities of Cordoba and Granada in Spain, November 10 and 12, 2004, "Sacred Origins and/as Endless Texts: The Mystery of the Matrix," Ovidius University, Constanta, Romania, Sept. 19, 2003, and "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."

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, Faulkner, American and Japanese postmodern novels, Heavy Metal interpretations of American Literature, original fiction, quantum theory and Pynchon and Auster, 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.