...many of her insightful and often illuminating analyses of poetic effects are gob-swiped by her unremitting focus on identifying what a mistake is. If these are all cases where Dickinson errs with ...some kind of purpose (conscious or not), wouldn't wrongness be part of her point? (97) McAlpine then continues by asserting that it may be "disingenuous" to assume a poem's execution "with the same degree of intentionality, precision, and skill" by those who find it "convenient-even comforting" to do so; that some evidence exists that "Dickinson had a nuanced understanding of her own mistakes"; but that "there are also situations where she seems to mistake sic with no inkling or purpose or awareness" (97). Book publications are The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art: A Cognitive Reading (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming).
Ancient prophets or poets considered to be wise beyond ordinary human capacity like Teiresias and Homer are depicted 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 20th-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 attention.
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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".
MORE FAREWELLS TO MARILYN Goldstein, Laurence
Michigan quarterly review,
07/2022, Volume:
61, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
1 SHARON OLDS THE DEATH OF MARILYN MONROE The ambulance men touched her cold body, lifted it, heavy as iron, onto the stretcher, tried to close the mouth, closed the eyes, tied the arms to the sides, ...moved a caught strand of hair, as if it mattered, saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by gravity, under the sheet, carried her, as if it were she, down the steps. The poem doesn't contribute to our appreciation of Marilyn's acting skills, nor does it contain information about her erotic or intellectual life posing and performing before the camera at beaches, nightclubs, and private parties in the mansions of executive authority. Playwright Arthur Miller, Marilyns husband and the University of Michigan's star graduate student beginning in the late 1930s, collaborated with John Huston in order to both complicate and clarify The Misfits, novel and screenplay, which Miller immodestly compared to widely studied classics such as Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Box office movies thrived during the 1950s in America, mixing public nostalgia with exotic frontier landscapes, shadowed always by the glamour and clamor of continuous military campaigns on West European and East Asian battlegrounds as well as sexist competition among the Kings and Queens of Hollywood studios, favoring, and often disfavoring, the outstanding Ur-blonde who became Joe DiMaggio's wife and then Arthur Millers wife.
Because cinema is made of the world (photography is always denotative) a phenomenology of cinema is also a phenomenology of being in the world. Percy frames the novel with two relationships that have ...the most immediate effect on Binx's relation to the world and his sense of self; one is with his (truly) alienated cousin Kate, who has been under psychiatric treatment since witnessing the death of her fiancée; the other is with his half-brother Lonnie Smith, whose selfless love for Binx transforms Binx by breaking through his self-isolation and engendering an authentic engagement with the world of others. "4 Binx lives at Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage, similar to Marcel's mere "recording apparatus"; he lacks Marcel's ingathering. ...Binx perceives the loss of the world as the world's receding from him; that is, the world has lost itself. The world is neither affected, nor diminished, nor stands in need of translation or interpretation. ...the world of the film is carried through time and space before us, without our action (which is another barrier between us and the world of the film; anyone who has ever leaned to one side in a theater seat to see around a corner or a door in a film has experienced this phenomenon).
Fortunately, I had my tape recorder in the car and afterward recorded all that I could remember from their conversation. ...not only did I have the good fortune to interview Welty about Percy in the ...quiet of her living room, but to see the two of them interact as friends reminiscing about the past. ...I wasn't going to tell you, but it was for "Eudora Welty Day" for my seventieth birthday.2 We sat on this sofa and talked. ...I didn't know he was on the train with his wife, but I went into the dining car for breakfast and there was a woman at the table with me, and she was talking about this and that. PS: Because Liebling was from New Orleans, he read The Moviegoer and recommended it to Jean, who was on the National Book Award committee that year.
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In this essay, Kip Kline and Kathleen Knight Abowitz use Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer to examine the existential plight of young Americans today who, as they turn the broad and long corner from ...youth to adulthood, are engaged in a search for self‐knowledge and identity construction. They are particularly interested in the young adult as “college student,” engaged in the work of postsecondary education, autonomous from but often still very closely connected to their family of origin in a culture saturated by late‐capitalist consumerism and commercial media. Kline and Knight Abowitz interpret this novel in order to examine a malaise specific to our current historical moment that may characterize how young people experience institutions such as U.S. colleges and universities as well as the institution of the contemporary American family. They also wish to show that particular themes in existentialism, which can be teased out in novels such as The Moviegoer, can assist our analysis of the contemporary malaise of the college student and provide theorists, educators, and advocates with possible ways of responding to
it.
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This article explores Walker Percy’s use of Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of “Thirdness” as an interpretive tool in connection with Percy’s use of the Bible in his novel, The Second Coming. In ...this context, Peirce’s “Thirdness” may be understood as that which mediates between a word (say, w-a-t-e-r, spelled out in Helen Keller’s hand) and a thing (the stuff called “water” simultaneously flowing over Helen Keller’s other hand) as, indeed, Walker Percy defines “Thirdness” in his essay, “The Delta Factor” (The Message in the Bottle, 3-45). As such, C.S. Peirce’s “Thirdness” serves Percy as a model for understanding the function of “triadic” (human) language in the operation of relations both human and divine.
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As the twenty-first century inches toward its third decade, the practice of higher education in the US is also in something of an untenable situation. PIAAC scores--results reported by the Programme ...for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, as administered by the Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development--show that American university and college graduates possess abysmal numeracy and literacy skills compared with graduates in other countries. Books such as William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift, and Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton's Praying for the Party paint a disturbing picture of the erosion of academic rigor and standards at American universities and colleges and the dire consequences of that erosion for undergraduates who are misled into thinking that their degrees are meaningful indicators of acquired knowledge and accomplishment. Generally downplayed as a contributing factor in the hollowing-out of American higher education is the overemphasis on so- called research by professors and Ph.D. students.
This contribution brings together Jacques Derrida's The Post Card, Jean-Luc Nancy's Being Singular Plural, Wayne Koestenbaum's fables, and Edouard Glissant's Treatise on the Whole-World to ...conceptualize a framework for translation informed by media studies, deconstruction, queer theory, and performance studies. Through reading my own "undeliverable" correspondences with noted translator Mary Ann Caws, I consider how the epistolary affect of contemporary virtual interactions requires closer attention to the staging of coincidence and copresence, voyeurism and intimacy, but also to the lapses that allow passing--the detours and detournements of transmission. In continuing to probe the efficacy of translation as a mode that exceeds the parameters of the territorial and the individual, I revisit my earlier theorizations of the "migratory text" as a work that is born in translation to consider how the untranslatable begets translation as a point of disconnective contact; how translation can serve as its own resistance. Keywords: Digital intimacy, epistolary, media studies, migratory text, translation studies
