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

[Garic Barranger <nikkibar AT aol.com>]

Dear Troy,

Please feel free to lurk as much as you'd like. 

Although Walker was a good friend of mine, I've never gotten into his closeness to SK per se. Talking to him about SK would tend to make him somewhat depressed so we stayed away from those dark parts of the woods in our conversations. Likewise Heidegger.

  You might like to have a look at his other closeness to Charles Sanders Peirce by looking into Ken Ketner's exchange of letters with Walker called A Thief of Peirce. If that piques your interest, check out Ketner's other book His Glassy Essence.  Ketner is the world's preeminent authority  on Peirce and teaches at the University of Lubbock. Ken is/was as close to Walker in the philosophy mode as you can come; so if you are interested in that side of Walker as a pathway into SK, you couldn't do better than to contact him. His e-dress is above.

Nikki Barranger

nikkibar AT aol.com

On Jul 4, 2011, at 12:27 PM, Troy Smith wrote:

Hi,

This is Troy Smith of Baltimore, MD. I am a Master's of Library Science student at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and in the past year I have become enthralled by the works of Søren Kierkegaard. It was through him that I recently rediscovered Walker Percy. (I have only read The Moviegoer, a book which, after reading Kierkegaard, seems all the more vital to me in hindsight.) Ever since I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2005, I have kicked around the idea of going to graduate school for a degree in English literature, but always balked because I could not commit to writing a thesis or (maybe even) a dissertation on one particular author or book. It was the classic existential paradox of being "condemned to be free." Anyway, that changed for me when, after reading many other authors, I finally read Kierkegaard and decided that I would commit myself to studying him. I do not, however, have even a bachelor's in philosophy, so it would probably take quite a lot of additional coursework in order to study S.K. at the graduate level. What I do have is a bachelor's in English literature and a serious passion for the discipline, so, when I learned of the several Southern authors influenced by S.K. (Percy, Faulkner, O'Connor), I decided that I would write a thesis on one, some, or all of them and their connections to Kierkegaard. So that's my long-winded explanation for why I'll be observing. This spring I'll be applying for library jobs and M.A. programs at universities with strong programs in Southern literature and professors who write about Percy, Faulkner, and O'Connor, especially vis-à-vis S.K. In the meantime, I'll be reading Percy and lurking around here. I hope you won't mind!

Best wishes,

Troy Smith 

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