Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Beck, David A" <dabeck AT iupui.edu>]

Peter and Rhonda,

I too sympathize. I normally stagger my assignments, but I messed up 
with my cut and past job on my syllabi. All four classes turned in 
their work this week!

Humanitarian or holy? Well, that's a positive spin. I see it as 
atonement, an act of asceticism to pay for my many sins (and if I read 
one more essay that starts with "In today's society....").

Just to add something percean, I used to teach CP's Fight Club with 
Lancelot. I later dropped the FC part, because both books touch on the 
same theme of starting a new society. What I found, via reading student 
papers, was that the two books were too similar for an intro to fiction 
class, so I dropped FC, because the students actually preferred 
Lancelot.

My problem with Chuck is that he seems to be a one trick poney. For me, 
Choke was FC revisited, except replace violence for sex.

Back to the stack.
-David



Quoting Peter Beurskens <pbeurskens AT SOUTHEASTMN.EDU>:

> Rhonda--I sympathize.  I too have a mountain of essays to face.  I do
> find it helps that I allow myself the reward of a long morning or
> evening of reading a book when I have completed a pile of papers.  I
> wonder how Percy faced the task of grading--how he considered it,
> philosophically.  But then when Percy taught, it was more creative
> writing and at the gradualte level, wasn't it?  Anyone know?  I have
> tried to think of grading student writing as either humanitarian or
> holy, but someone it doesn't help.
>
> Pete
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of RHONDA MCDONNELL
> Sent: Tue 10/7/2008 7:59 PM
> To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
> Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk
>
>
> I have no answers, but you have reawakened in me a desire to read
> Palahniuk--as soon as I grade the mountain of essays that I'm
> presently avoiding.
>
>
> --Rhonda
>
> "You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in
> spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the
> faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing."
>
>                                    Walker Percy
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 08:30:22 -0500
> From: gregory.plemmons AT Vanderbilt.Edu
> To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk
>
> I've always wondered the same. Haven't re-read (or seen) _Choke_
> since the movie came out, but there's a wonderful passage on page 151:
>
> Every addiction...drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all
> just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our
> education. Our bite of the apple.
> Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and
> the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people
> can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be
> explained and understood...
>
> "We don't live in the real world anymore," she said. "We live in a
> world of symbols."
>
> Like Percy also, the protagonist (Victor Mancini) also shares an
> incomplete medical education. But I've never heard Pahlaniuk comment
> on Percy in most of the interviews I've read.
>
> Gregory Plemmons
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Wade Riddick
> Sent: Sun 10/5/2008 6:41 PM
> To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
> Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk
>
> > List,
> >
> > Just been reading _Survivor_ by Palahniuk.
> >
> > Many echos of Percy.
> >
> > Wonder if he ever read Percy?
> >
> > Such lines as "It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier
> > outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized." (p.88 _Survivor_)
> > speak to a common source.
> >
> > Any one know if Palahniuk ever spoke of Percy?
>
> No, but I just saw _Fight Club_ again the other night and his attack on the
> spiritual corrosiveness of consumer credit appears, in retrospect,
> materially prophetic.  We seem to be stuck in one of those periodic
> economic crises where all the supposedly "sin-less" businessmen have
> awakened to the fact that their ticker symbols and other financial
> instruments have drifted far afield of the underlying reality they were
> supposed to represent.
>
>
> --
> An archive of all list discussion is available at
> https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/percy-l/
>
> Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
>
>
>
>
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>
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