Dr. John C. Hampsey
Professor
English
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Office: 47-26S
E-mail: jhampsey@calpoly.edu
Phone: 805-756-2239
Education
| Degree | Major Emphasis | Institution | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ph.D. | English Literature | Boston College | 1982 |
| B.A. | English | Holy Cross College | 1976 |
Teaching and Research Interests
British Romanticism and William Blake
British Victorian Literature
Classical Literature (Greek)
Existentialism
History of the Novel
Western Intellectual History
Selected Publications
Books
Soda Lake
Soda Lake opens with an unnamed narrator seeing a man disappear into a lake of white salt. This sets the narrator on a quest of discovery, shaped by a series of stories with interconnected characters who all grapple with threats to their identities. The narrator's suspenseful journey mixes personal and collective human history, and his definition of self mysteriously fades as he gets closer to the elusive and timeless "McCuade," who may or may not be real.
Shifting from the coastal valley of central California to Chicago, Ireland, Greece, and France, each chapter in the novel presents a protagonist in the midst of a psychological struggle wherein the idea of McCuade becomes stronger than the reality of the characters themselves. With a twenty-first-century nod to works as diverse as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Renata Adler's Speedboat, Soda Lake blends elements of the archetypal detective quest with stories of the uncanny in order to freshly render the individual human psyche in its struggle to stand up to a progressively transmogrifying world.
Kaufman's Hill a memoir, Bancroft Press, January, 2015, hardback. Order on Amazon.
Paranoia and Contentment: a personal essay on Western Thought (intellectual history from the Greeks to contemporary America) University of Virginia Press, December, 2004. University of Virginia Press Books
Articles and Nonfiction
“The Idea of the Good” Philosophy and Literature, (April 2016): 285-297.
“Ethnic American Literature, Iowa, and the American Tradition” The Midwest Quarterly, (Autumn 2015): 70-83.
“The Rivers.” The Gettysburg Review (Winter 2014).
"Hector's Reflection as Paranoid Vision." Dialogi, Journal of Culture and Society (Spring 2011): 134-139.
“Aestheticizing the Wasteland, Revisioning the Journey: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” The Gettysburg Review, Autumn 2008: 495-501.
“Doom, Providence, Accident.” The Midwest Quarterly, (Winter 2001): 133-149. (This essay is an abbreviated version of Chapter Three of Paranoia and Contentment.)
“Innocence . . . and Irony?: The Poetry of Jane Taylor.” European Romantic Review, (July 1997):262-274.
“Houses of The Mind: the Architecture of Childhood.” Antioch Review 51 no. 2 (Spring, 1993):251-263.
“Trapped in Sibyl's Jar: Hopkins's Dialectic of Self in Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves.” Colby Quarterly 26 no. 4 (December, 1990): 226-231.
“What Self?: Notes on Modern First Person Narrative.” Alaska Quarterly Review 9 no. 1 & 2 (Fall & Winter, 1990): 153-164. .”
“Defoe's Moll Flanders: The Realism of the Spoken Word.” Greyfriar: Siena Studies in Literature (1990): 35-42.
“Unbearable Parmenides: The Metaphysics of Milan Kundera.” San Jose Studies 16 no. 3 (Fall, 1990): 56-64.
“Strange Truths in Kafka's America.” The Gettysburg Review 3 no. 2 (1990):400-408.
“The Queen of the Air: Consistency in Ruskin's Moral Aesthetics.” The McNeese Review 32 (1989):49-57 (50th Anniversary Issue).
“On Fragmentation.” The Gettysburg Review 1 no. 3 (1988):445-451 (philosophic essay on the western sense of dread).
“Checking in on Time in Faulkner's Sound and the Fury.” The Arizona Quarterly 43 (1987):133-140.
“Tiriel Revisited: The Case of Problem Children.” Greyfriar: Siena Studies in Literature 27 (1986):31-48.
“Blake's Bound Children.” Ball State University Forum 27 (1986):20-37.
Fiction
“Helena” The Antioch Review, (Spring 2019) 305-317 (from Soda Lake)
“The Garage Room." The Alaska Quarterly Review (Fall/Winter 2014): 100-110.
“Measuring the Loss of Brisa.” Witness 10 no. 1 (1996):166-175.
“Almost . . . The Bastille.” Sou' Wester 16 no. 1 (1988):67-75.
“On Lost Gardens.” Small Pond 25 no. 3 (1988):26-28.
“Night 223.” North Dakota Quarterly 55 (1987):90-93.
Awards and Honors
University Distinguished Teaching Award, Cal Poly, 2005
CLA Student Council Teacher of the Year Award, 2005
President's Service Award, Cal Poly, May, 2004.