Walker Percy

In this course we will examine a variety of literature-poetry, short stories, and novelswritten by Southern authors and set in the American South. We will place particular focus on the post-World War II literature of the Southern Gothic. Students will be introduced to the particular artistry and concerns of Southern histories, cultures, and varieties of experience through a diverse group of authors. Important themes and issues emerging from our readings and discussion will include racism,

Words Underway offers the first full account of the important contributions the Continental tradition has made to the philosophy of language. The book examines the vital work of a range of thinkers, including Heidegger, Gadamer, Blanchot, and Kristeva. In it, I argue that Continental theorists are particularly helpful in recognizing our unique potential for becoming alienated from some discourse. At the same time, I argue that Continental philosophy of language tends not to treat the alienated relationship to language as something absolute. For most Continental theorists, at least, language is a living system, that is, a system maintained by undergoing constant expansion and transformation by language users. The book goes on to explore the attention Continental theorists have given to the way that forms of political power, for example gender dynamics in communication, can sometimes thwart this process and thus reinforce alienation. This book will transform the reader’s sense of what the philosophy of language is about and will attract the attention of students and scholars of both philosophy of language and the Continental tradition.

My contribution to Catholic World Report's annual feature with scholars and writers giving the best books they read during the year--whether the books were published in that year or not. Included in my copy of my selection here is the link to this year's feature, which appeared on December 17, 2021.

The American philosophical novelist and essayist Walker Percy, best known for his literary novels of the South, was an earnest semiotician who promoted the triadic theory in language. Percy's theory describes human language as a " space-time event " whose ultimate expression is to be found in the act of naming. How does Percy's semiotics apply to animals, given the current state of the science? My thesis is in agreement with the general consensus that non-human animals seem to demonstrate mere dyadic communication, while humans capably and routinely evince triadic language; therefore language is a unique property of the human species.

In the early part of the 20th century German Catholic theologian and cultural critic, Romano Guardini, published The End of Modernity, outlining the conceptual shift of self-identity and cosmology from Antiquity to Modernity. Characterizing modernity as turning upon a false self-identity termed “mass man.” This false image of life furthers the individual person’s fragmentation, and deafens their ability to hear the Catholic voice. Walker Percy’s familiarity with Guardini is most explicit in The Last Gentleman where Percy represents the difficulty of hearing the call of Catholicism. Recently, Paul Elie and Dana Gioia have pointed out the lacking literary presence of Catholic authors in American culture, sparking debate among literary critics like Gregory Wolfe. I hold the position that this was foreseen by the Catholic intellect of the early twentieth century, articulated by Romano Guardini and employed in the fiction of Walker Percy. This paper focuses on articulating the difficulties faced by Catholic literature almost half a century ago and placing them in the context being discussed by contemporary critics. Concluding that if a Catholic novelist’s job is to make belief believable, a more productive and illuminating question is whether contemporary Catholic novelists face the same, if not more or less, difficult task of communicating the Catholic voice than their mid-twentieth century predecessors.

The article provides a summary of the doctoral thesis in English literature, entitled « Representations of the Grail Quest in Medieval and Modern Literature », was directed by Dr Raluca L. Radulescu and Prof Tony Brown. The thesis was presented on January 31, 2014, at the School of English, Bangor University.
By closely engaging with medieval and modern versions of the Grail quest and by examining the medieval romances through the experience of minor and non-elect characters, the thesis offers a new perspective not only on the studied texts but also on the entire tradition of the Grail quest in medieval and modern literature. Moreover, the thesis contributes to the burgeoning field of medievalist studies, showing how modern texts can reveal new meanings when examined in the light of medieval tradition to which they allude, both directly and indirectly.

The Christian conversion of Binx Bolling in Walker Percy's novel, "The Moviegoer," has elicited criticism from a number of literary scholars, like Quinlan," who claims that this development reduces the novel to mere "Catholic propaganda."  Drawing on the work of Rene Girard, in particular his concepts of mimetic desire and "novelistic conversion," as developed in "Deceit, Desire, and the Novel," I argue that the novel follows the logic of Christian conversion from beginning to end. I contend that Binx Bolling's conversion at the conclusion of the novel is deeply resonant with the thematic concerns and narrative logic of the novel.

Original em inglês. [Tradução para o português de João Máttar -Centro de Estudos do Pragmatismo -PUC/SP, [email protected] ] Resumo Charles Sanders Peirce dedicou muito de seus esforços como estudioso preparando livros-textos, artigos, lições, aulas, palestras e esquemas que iriam promover um fértil arcabouço para a investigação genuína em uma "comunidade científica de pesquisadores". Que tipo de modelo para a educação o pragmatismo, à maneira do pragmatismo de Charles Peirce, oferece? Como a infusão de um modo de investigação pragmatista na educação afetaria a maneira pela qual o ensino e o aprendizado são compreendidos e praticados? Neste artigo, eu conceituarei o sistema educacional sugerido pelo pragmatismo de Charles Peirce e avaliarei as diferenças entre um esquema educacional pragmatista e alguns dos principais modelos não-pragmatistas atuais.

Familiarity, so the saying goes, breeds contempt. But, why should familiarity breed such a negative thing as contempt, or other negative orientations? There is something paradoxical about this little folk saying. For, if one is genuinely familiar-possessing the goods of having a high epistemic grade of cognitive or appreciative contact-with some piece of reality, then why should contempt follow on the heels of such genuine epistemic and existential intimacy? At first glance, this seems both bizarre and incongruous. And yet, as anyone who has relegated their most intimate beloved to the status of persona non grata knows, such appreciative failure is the common stock of human experience. This is a 'commonplace' mystery I propose to examine, with a focus on another experiential state parasitic on or constitutive of familiarity: jadedness. In what follows, I will attempt to sketch an initial theory of jadedness, and then expand that theory by attending to Percy's unique philosophical contributions. Percy's contributions suggest, I will argue, that there are at least two types of jadedness-a narrow, domain specific psychological type and a global, existential type-that share structural similarities such as volitional and epistemic inertia, an unsettled loss of meaning, a faulty assumption of epistemic completion or superiority, and a foreclosure of ontological possibilities. I will then show how Percy uniquely integrates these two types of jadedness within a broader framework of what it means to be human (as homo viator, a creature), offering a distinctive and philosophically integrated account of why being jaded involves a fundamental distortion of our humanity. Finally, insofar as jadedness involves failures of humility, I will argue that Percy's philosophical and theological work on our "unsignifiable" uniqueness provides an important critical alternative to prevailing philosophical accounts of humility, and also a unique solution to the problem of being jaded.

Walker Percy contrasts being marooned on an island and using a "pocketknife … to explore [a] dogfish" as being in some ways preferable to having all the dissecting instruments of a "zoological laboratory." This paper will use Percy's distinction between a "sign" and a "symbol"-surely a pocketknife compared to the surgical distinctions available in Charles S. Peirce's semiotic-to separate signs from two different kinds of symbols, one based on what Peirce calls "precisive abstraction," the other based on what he calls "hypostatic abstraction," as well as the two ways of thinking, Nominalism and Realism, based on using those kinds of abstractions. In short, this paper will try to sharpen the distinction between signs and different kinds of symbols as a handy tool for carving up all kinds of semiotic fish.

Ancient prophets or poets considered to be wise beyond ordinary human capacity like Teiresias and Homer are depicted as blind to emphasize their ability to see things beyond what is available to ordinary human senses. Their outward blindness conceals a deeper vision. At least, the prophet or prophetic poet is able to attend to things ordinary human beings do not. The 20 th-century American Catholic novelist, Walker Percy, describes the novelist as performing 'a quasi-prophetic function.' Similarly, Flannery O'Connor describes the novelist as having 'prophetic vision.' The novelist is not really a prophet, but his or her task is similar to that of the prophet, even though he or she is not called by God and the prophet is. The task of the prophet is to communicate to human beings 'things remote from our knowledge.' In this essay, I will consider the ways in which the novelist can be understood to be prophetic, or quasi-prophetic. First, I will trace Percy's account of the novelist as filling a 'quasi-prophetic function.' Next, I will turn to St. Thomas Aquinas's account of prophecy to add speculative depth to Percy's less systematic presentation, especially Aquinas's consideration of the imaginative and cogitative interior senses. Then, I will consider the ways in which a specifically Catholic novelist might be prophetic, over and above the non-Catholic novelist. For this argument, I will turn to Flannery O'Connor and her description of the Catholic novelist as relying on 'anagogical vision,'  following the medieval interpreters of the Bible. O'Connor will help to show how the Catholic faith can help the Catholic writer see things in the real world that others cannot, and then to bring them to their readers' attention.

This article is an exercise in what Deleuze terms "nomad thought." It proceeds on the assumption that media ecology McLuhan style is a nomadic mode of exploration. The textual strategy is acoustic resonance rather than visual connection. The article has come to fruition after a long period of meditation. The tacit invitation is for the reader to do the same in this age of fast ideas and conceptual clutter. [China Media Research. 2014; 10(3): 94-104]

------> Now available as open-source e-book at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/uscpress_pub/7/ <------

_Unvarnishing Reality_ draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode for authors from both nations--including Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, and Sasha Sokolov." ///// REVIEWS:

"The breadth of Maus's critical reading is impressive and sets his text apart from other treatments of Cold War literature that include Soviet and/or Russian material.[...] Highly recommended."

  -- Brian Diemert, _Choice_ (Dec. 2011) /////

"Maus's study constantly engages in suggestive juxtapositions between American and Russian works that shed fresh light on their narrative practices."

  -- David Seed, _Utopian Studies_ 23.2 (2012) /////

"Maus has read voluminously in his subject, both in the literature and in critical studies [...]. He is to be applauded for his fresh readings of dystopian classics as well as for bringing lesser-known writers into the story.[...] If a reader is looking for a quick survey of Russian and American Cold War fiction, this is it."

    -- Denise Youngblood, _Slavic Review_ 71.3 (Fall 2012) /////

"Maus’s analysis of the individual texts will give the reader new ways of thinking about them. Historians who work on the cultural history of the era will no doubt want to consider the insights he offers into the language and philosophy of satirical fiction."

  -- Mara Drogan, _Cold War History_ 13.2 (2013) /////

"On the US side, the closest analogy to the totalitarian system is the totalizing drive of certain languages—anticommunist, mediatic-consumerist, bureaucratic, technologically utopian—chiefly in the American 1950s and then again in the 1980s [...] To be sure, none of these coalesce into the langue de bois (the “wooden tongue”) that all but takes over public discourse in the East, nor do they enjoy the logistical and institutional backing afforded by the Kremlin apparatus, Pynchonian paranoia notwithstanding. And yet, Maus is right: the satire of mainstream, institutional, or 'official' idioms is one kind of literature that formally and thematically can be said to bring together—and thus render comparable—writers from saliently different systems."

  -- Christian Moraru, _American Literature_ 85.2 (June 2013)

Catholic World Report, December 15, 2019. My contribution to the annual book round-up done at Catholic World Report for 2019. The CWR lists do not have to be new books, but simply the best ones contributors have read in the year.  Thus my list always includes some new books, but many old books that are new to me--and even books that are old to me that I have reread.

Literature of the U.S. South. Our focus in the American Literature seminar this year will be on the long, grand, and problematic tradition of U.S. Southern literature, especially fiction in both comic and tragic modes as it developed after the Civil War to the present. The South has given the U.S. some of its greatest writers, while also enacting perhaps more powerfully than any other region the nation's ongoing internal debate regarding the nation's ideals vs. its realities, equality vs. rampant inequities, an obsession with the past and yet also a propulsive drive to seize the future. Most well known for a focus on the paradoxes of "race" in both the individual and national psyche, southern literature also exemplifies imaginative writers' concerns with regional history and memory; oral story-telling as a source of inspiration for textual experiment; and a long tradition of understanding that local, regional, ethnic, and racial identities are always marked by global connections and crossings-especially the U.S. South's deep cultural connections to "other" tropical Souths in the Caribbean and Latin American that also experienced plantation slavery, colonialism, civil wars, and nationalism.

Preface to Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 22:4 (Fall 2019): 5-19.  In this essay I discuss the peculiar appeal of the great 20th-century Catholic novelist Walker Percy, whose works attempted to convey the true depth of the human person over against both scientistic and irrational understandings. Percy, whose works focused on the peculiar nature of human language, the push and pull moderns feel against and toward community, love itself, and the message of the Gospel in its Catholic form, is particularly illuminated by several recent books that I discuss herein: Jessica Hooten Wilson's Reading Walker Percy; Wilson's Walker Percy and the Search for Influence (which argues for a better understanding of literary influence and demonstrates Percy's own influence from Dostoevsky); and Brian A. Smith's Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfaring, which emphasizes Percy's understanding of humanity as rough pilgrimage through life and the ways in which Percy's Catholicism and American southern identities affected his views.  Included, as with all of my prefaces, are brief introductions to the other articles in the issue.

Addressing the overarching tensions surrounding how to judge its protagonist, I explore in this essay how Percy's Lancelot helps the theological reader to identify the ways that Lancelot Lamar serves as a type for the modern person whose distorted view of self lashes out in some of the ugliest forms of word and deed. I aim to identify what must be cautioned, at least in part, in what Walker Percy calls the " small cautionary tale " of Lancelot. will move through the three broad themes of confession, self and desire found in Lancelot with the help of Walker Percy's essays and Sarah Coakley's theological thought. In Walker Percy's writings as an essayist, his concern for the modern predicament of the stranded self gives poignancy to the core of (Catholic) Christian faith. And, in the writings of Sarah Coakley, her articulation of human sexual desire and its deep roots in an innate human spiritual longing for God helps to provide not only an understanding of the violent and perverse stranded self, but also of the sort of posture that needs to be adopted in order for a restoration of self to God to occur through rightly-ordered desire.

Brian A. Smith submits that Walker Percy “placed great emphasis on the dangers of functional or utilitarian definitions of law” that deny personhood, or the quality of being human. This essay examines Smith’s study of Percy in light of Friedrich Hayek’s anti-utilitarian jurisprudence, which champions political decentralization and the devolution of power to local authorities. Smith, not Percy, is my principal subject, in particular his recent book, "Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer." I consider Percy’s account of decentralization and localism, as presented by Smith, through a Hayekian lens. Hayek’s notion of cosmos (a legal order that is grown, evolutionary, endogenous, spontaneous, and complex, and that disperses power rather than centralizing it) complements Percy’s sense of place and community as naturally ordering forces. Smith channels Hayek by insisting that “the expert’s relentless pursuit of improvement erodes the layman individual’s capacity for choice, and thus, adds anxiety and displacement in an ever-changing world."

Paper Presented at APSA Annual Meeting 2019
Eric Voegelin Society Panel: "Literature, Persons, and Modern Politics"
ABSTRACT:
Political philosopher Eric Voegelin and novelist Walker Percy both make their
readers aware of a certain tension between politics and the demands of the Christian life. To be sure, the tension is not new. However, many contemporary commentators who critique the “post-Christian” political schema effectively blame liberalism for Christians’ discomfort in the world. At first glance, Walker Percy would appear to agree; but, when one attends to the Voegelinian influence upon his writings, it becomes clear that Percy does not point fingers at any particular political movement, but considers uneasiness or “malaise” to be a recurring existential problem throughout all of history. He adopts Voegelin’s formulation that political history has oscillated between “cosmological orders” and post-Incarnation “differentiated” societies which struggle to center themselves as an obedient and expectant people. The same pattern occurs in the interior of the human person, says Percy. The Christian will not feel comfortable in the modern age, because he is a member of an exiled chosen people; and, this alienation is similar to the experience of the "differentiated" Jewish people in the Old Testament. This connection is made most explicit in Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation volume of Order and History and in Walker Percy’s two novels narrating the life of William Barrett, The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming. In these works, political alienation has a place in the religious experience of a people in that it reminds them of their precarious and temporary place in the world and of their supernatural covenant with God. Furthermore, the tension of paradox more truthfully reveals their identity as human persons. Such a tension, then, is essential to the Christian life. Any politics that tries to quiet it presents dangers—not only to the Christian journey, but also to health of the human person.

Psychiatrists, like the antidepressants they prescribe, aims to enhance a patient's internal psychic well-being. Yet what ails many may not be an internal state like depression or anxiety, but alienation.  And the experts of the self to whom we turn cannot "cure" our collective form of life in which alienation takes root.

Resumo Charles Sanders Peirce dedicou muito de seus esforços como estudioso preparando livros-textos, artigos, lições, aulas, palestras e esquemas que iriam promover um fértil arcabouço para a investigação genuína em uma “comunidade científica de pesquisadores”. Que tipo ...

Though Walker Percy is best known as a novelist, he was first and foremost a philosopher. This collection offers a sustained examination of key aspects to his more technical philosophy (primarily semiotics and the philosophy of language) as well as some of his lesser known philosophical interests, including the philosophy of place and dislocation. Contributors expound upon Percy’s multifaceted philosophy, an invitation to literature and theology scholars as well as to philosophers who may not be familiar with the philosophical underpinnings of his work.