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

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  • From: "Beck, David A" <dabeck AT iupui.edu>
  • To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk
  • Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 22:54:27 -0400

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.


--
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