Micah Mattix on the twentieth anniversary of Walker Percy’s death and his literary and intellectual legacy.

TNR has posted W.H. Auden’s 1944 review of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

Tags: Auden, Kierkegaard

I’ve not seen a single episdoe of Lost, but I’m told there are a number of literary allusions in the story lines. This morning I came across a reference to the books of Lost.  Percy’s Lancelot makes an appearance, so now I’m half tempted to watch the show — although I’d have to start from the beginning.

Tags: Lancelot, Lost

I recently found a blog with an intriguing post on the likes and dislikes of Christian Hipsters. The author has identified the unique qualities of a new breed of Christian who is proud of his faith, but also actively engaged with modern culture. When writing about authors favored by Christian Hipsters, he provides the following list:

They tend to be fans of any number of the following authors: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, John Howard Yoder, Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright, Brennan Manning, Eugene Peterson, Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, Soren Kierkegaard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robison, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important.

It is hard to argue with this list. By this criteria alone, I suppose I should attend the next hipster meeting…. Who am I kidding, hipsters are too cool for meetings.

Tags: hipsters

I recently read an article entitled “Death by Suicide: The End of English Departments and Literacy” by Mary Garbar. Garbar bemoans the rise of graphic novels as subjects of “serious” academic study. She believes that this academic decay began with deconstructionism and was reinforced by gender-specific studies.

Actually the gender studies theorists were the ones to put the final stake through writing, while viciously accusing it of “phallologocentrism.” They accused writing itself of following the trajectory of male sexual response in its “linear” goal-seeking of meaning. Grammar, logic, and universal meaning promoted the male, imperialist goal of subjugation. Writing, like male sexuality, was inherently rapacious.

As alternative, Elaine Showalter took her cue from Luce Irigaray’s notion of “labial thinking,” and advanced “uterine withdrawal and containment.” “Women,” Helene Cixous insisted, “must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes….”

I’m quite certain that if Percy were teaching today he would be chased out of most English department staff meetings. I wish he could have lived long enough to draft a follow-up to Lost in the Cosmos that addressed the unraveling of English as an intellectual discipline.

Tags: gender studies

The folks over at National Review have put together a list of the best conservative novels published since 1950. The Thanatos Syndrome makes number five on their list. I assume it is Percy’s attack on Fedville technocrat killers that earns him a place amongst conservative thinkers. While not known for being purposely political, Percy does use his insight and biting wit to highlight the devastating consequences of allowing collective social “good” to override the sanctity and primacy of individual life.

Tags: conservative, The Thanatos Syndrome

This from Joseph Bottum over at First Things.

J.D. Salinger is dead.  I suppose in some perverse way I’ve been waiting for this moment in hopes that there would be a flood of new Salinger material published after he was dead.  I’m a real charitable guy. Perhaps it’s all been destroyed.  At any rate, in this time when most are talking about Catcher in the Rye I can’t help but insist that Franny and Zooey is the better book.  By the way, Franny and Zooey was nominated for the National Book Award the same year that Percy won the award for The Moviegoer.

Tags: Moviegoer, Salinger