Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes

Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes PDF Author: Allen Pridgen
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9781575910406
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Sometimes oblivious to the sacramental signs of life, sometimes clear-eyed, both Will at the end of The Second Coming and Tom at the end of The Thanatos Syndrome finally assent to the wondrous possibilities these signs signify. They begin to believe in the possibilities for a life that waits for them on the horizon and down the road."--BOOK JACKET.

Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes

Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes PDF Author: Allen Pridgen
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9781575910406
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Sometimes oblivious to the sacramental signs of life, sometimes clear-eyed, both Will at the end of The Second Coming and Tom at the end of The Thanatos Syndrome finally assent to the wondrous possibilities these signs signify. They begin to believe in the possibilities for a life that waits for them on the horizon and down the road."--BOOK JACKET.

Walker Percy's Search for Community

Walker Percy's Search for Community PDF Author: John F. Desmond
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325880
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
In this criticism of Percy, John F. Desmond traces the writer's enduring concerns with community. These concerns, Desmond argues, were grounded in the realism of such Scholastics as Aquinas and Duns Scotus.

Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer

Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer PDF Author: Brian A. Smith
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498537553
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Walker Percy is one of America’s great novelists, and he ought to be known as a political thinker as well. In Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer, Brian A. Smith makes the case that we should understand Percy’s novels and essays together as a guide to living in a complex world. Percy cultivated a philosophical and literary approach that revealed the fault lines in the modern mind. He portrayed man as a wayfarer: peristantly unsatisfied and wandering in search of a perfectly complete solution to life’s dilemmas. His writing captures the restlessness of the human heart and allows us to comprehend our temptation to escape our sense of alienation and longing. Drawing ideas from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature, Percy’s multidimensional account of American political life shows the ways that today’s approaches to life often fall short and leave us more unsatisfied with ourselves and others than ever. Percy hoped we would evade the temptations to escape the life of the wayfarer and accept our misplaced longings, alienation, depression, and anxiety as part of the human condition. Failing to do this might lead us to accept ever more extreme political and social ideas as the basis for life. The promise of embracing Percy’s political teaching is that we might then be able to accept ourselves as we really are in order to join with others in authentic community.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide PDF Author: John F. Desmond
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813231272
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide is a study of the phenomenon of suicide in modern and post-modern society as represented in the major fictional works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Walker Percy. In his study, suicide is understood in both a literal and spiritual sense as referring to both the actual suicides in their works and to the broader social malaise of spiritual suicide, or despair. In the 19th century Dostoevsky called suicide “the terrible question of our age”. For his part, Percy understood 20th century Western culture as “suicidal” in both its social, political and military behavior and in the deeper sense that its citizenry had suffered an ontological “loss of self” or “deformation” of being. Likewise, Thomas Merton called the 20th century an “age of suicide”.

A Political Companion to Walker Percy

A Political Companion to Walker Percy PDF Author: Peter Augustine Lawler
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813141907
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In 1962, Walker Percy (1916--1990) made a dramatic entrance onto the American literary scene when he won the National Book Award for fiction with his first novel, The Moviegoer. A physician, philosopher, and devout Catholic, Percy dedicated his life to understanding the mixed and somewhat contradictory foundations of American life as a situation faced by the wandering and won-dering human soul. His controversial works combined existential questioning, scientific investigation, the insight of the southern stoic, and authentic religious faith to produce a singular view of humanity's place in the cosmos that ranks among the best American political thinking. An authoritative guide to the political thought of this celebrated yet complex American author, A Political Companion to Walker Percy includes seminal essays by Ralph C. Wood, Richard Reinsch II, and James V. Schall, S.J., as well as new analyses of Percy's view of Thomistic realism and his reaction to the American pursuit of happiness. Editors Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith have assembled scholars of diverse perspectives who provide a necessary lens for interpreting Percy's works. This comprehensive introduction to Percy's "American Thomism" is an indispensable resource for students of American literature, culture, and politics.

Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation

Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation PDF Author: John Sykes
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826266231
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
"Examining the writings of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy against the background of the Southern Renaissance from which they emerged, Sykes explores how the writers shared a distinctly Christian notion of art that led them to see fiction as revelatory but adopted different theological emphases and rhetorical strategies"--Provided by publisher.

Signs of the Giver

Signs of the Giver PDF Author: Southwestern College (Winfield, Kan.)
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595270581
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
This volume contains collection of ten essays that focus on the fiction and non-fiction of southern novelist Walker Percy (1916-1990). Delivered during the 2002 Walker Percy Undergraduate Seminar held at Southwestern College in Winfield, KS, the contributors focus upon a wide array of topics relevant to the study of Percy's writings. Catholicism, race relations, existentialism and even Percy's semiotics receive attention in this dynamic collection.

Fears and Fascinations

Fears and Fascinations PDF Author: Thomas Fredrick Haddox
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 9780823225217
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Looking at the works of diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, this book focuses on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture. It contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.

Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction

Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction PDF Author: Gary M. Ciuba
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807138630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction -- Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy -- expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic René Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned -- and sometimes ritually sanctified -- victimization of those deemed outcasts. Ciuba offers an impressively broad intellectual discussion that gives universal cultural meaning to the southern experience of desire, violence, and divinity with which these four authors wrestled and out of which they wrote. In a comprehensive analysis of Porter's semiautobiographical Miranda stories, Ciuba focuses on the prescribed role of women that Miranda imitates and ultimately escapes. O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away reveals three characters whose scandalous animosity caused by religious rivalry leads to the unbearable stumbling block of violence. McCarthy's protagonist in Child of God, Lester Ballard, appears as the culmination of a long tradition of the sacred violence of southern religion, twisted into his own bloody faith. And Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome brings Ciuba's discussion back to the victim, in Tom Moore's renunciation of a society in which scapegoating threatens to become the foundation of a new social regime. From nostalgia for the old order to visions of a utopian tomorrow, these authors have imagined the interrelationship of desire, antagonism, and religion throughout southern history. Ciuba's insights offer new ways of reading Porter, O'Connor, McCarthy, and Percy as well as their contemporaries who inhabited the same culture of violence -- violence desired, dreaded, denied, and deified.

A Theology of Criticism

A Theology of Criticism PDF Author: Michael P. Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195333527
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
A number of critics and scholars argue for the notion of a distinctly Catholic variety of imagination, not as a matter of doctrine or even of belief, but rather as an artistic sensibility. They figure the blend of intellectual, emotional, spiritual and ethical assumptions that proceed from Catholic belief constitutes a vision of reality that necessarily informs the artist's imaginative expression. The notion of a Catholic imagination, however, has lacked thematic and theological coherence. To articulate this intuition is to cross the problematic interdisciplinary borders between theology and literature; and, although scholars have developed useful methods for undertaking such interdisciplinary "border-crossings," relatively few have been devoted to a serious examination of the theological aesthetic upon which these other aesthetics might hinge.In A Theology of Criticism, Michael Patrick Murphy proposes a new framework to better define the concept of a Catholic imagination. He explores the many ways in which the theological work of Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) can provide the model, content, and optic for distinguishing this type of imagination from others. Since Balthasar views art and literature precisely as theologies, Murphy surveys a broad array of poetry, drama, fiction, and film and sets it against central aspects of Balthasar's theological program. In doing so, Murphy seeks to develop a theology of criticism.This interdisciplinary work recovers the legitimate place of a distinct "theological imagination" in critical theory, showing that Balthasar's voice both challenges and complements contemporary developments. Murphy also contends that postmodern interpretive methodology, with its careful critique of entrenched philosophical assumptions and reiterated codes of meaning, is not the threat to theological meaning that many fear. On the contrary, by juxtaposing postmodern critical methodologies against Balthasar's visionary theological range, a space is made available for literary critics and theologians alike. More important, the critic is provided with the tools to assess, challenge, and celebrate the theological imagination as it is depicted today.