Thesis (M.C.S.)--Regent College, 1995. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-200).

Thesis (M.A.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010. / Directed by Scott Romine; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jul. 9, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-84).

Walker Percy differs from other American novelists in that he started writing fiction relatively late in life, after being trained as a physician and after considerable reading and writing in philosophy. Although critics have appreciated Percy's skills as a writer, they have seen Percy above all as a novelist of ideas, and, accordingly, the majority of critical articles and books about Percy has dealt with his themes, especially his philosophical themes, as well as with his philosophical sources. This study explores, therefore, the critical response to philosophical ideas in Percy's five novels to date, as evidenced first by reviews, then by the later articles and books. The critical response developed gradually as critics became aware of Percy's aims and pointed out his use of Christian existentialism and his attacks upon Cartesianism, Stoicism, and modern secular gnosticism. These critical evaluations of Percy's philosophical concerns have sometimes overshadowed interest in his more purely artistic concerns. However, the more a reader understands the underlying philosophical concepts that inform Percy's novels, the more he may understand what Percy is trying to say and the more he may appreciate Percy's accomplishment in expressing his philosophical ideas so skillfully in fictional form. Critics and readers may enjoy Percy's novels without knowing much about his philosophical ideas, but they cannot fully understand them. Thus this study concludes that the critical response to philosophical ideas in Percy's novels has done both Percy and Percy's readers a service.

Walker Percy thought a paradigm for the modern age, human beings, and life does not exist, and no paradigm vying for supremacy (religion, scientism, new age physics and philosophies) succeeds. He sought to create a “radical anthropology” to describe human beings and life. His anthropology has existential roots and culminates in the philosophy and semeiotic of American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Unlike any other creature, humans have symbolic capacity, first manifested in a child’s naming and demonstrated in human being’s unique language ability, the ability to communicate through symbol and not just sign. Percy conveyed his anthropology in his last three novels through a number symbolism corresponding to the theme of each novel based on Peirce’s Cenopythagoreanism, viewing the world through the paradigm of number. In Lancelot, Percy uses the symbol of the inverted three to illustrate Lancelot’s inverted search for evil. In The Second Coming, he uses diamonds and squares and fours to illustrate community and authentic communication in the novel. In The Thanatos Syndrome, he uses twos and sixes to represent the search for dyadic solutions to triadic problems. Percy sees a synechistic and synchronistic interconnected “fabric of life” to the universe, enabled by human symbolic capacity, or Peirce’s concept of relations.

The omission of boredom from 1950s cultural and literary discourse is somewhat glaring, especially considering the frequency with which terms such as banality, conformity, and uniformity appear in scholarly and popular representations of the era. Such evocations of social and personal malaise derive from postwar sociological and theoretical critiques that rather uncritically dismiss mass culture as hostile to expressions of individuality. For Frankfurt school theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, and Herbert Marcuse, the capitulation of individuals to a contented (and thoroughly dull) status quo is symptomatic of the disappearance of culturally distinct localities into a standardized national space, the parameters of which are determined by commodity culture. I argue that a closer inspection of filmic, literary, and archival texts from the era reveals the limitations of such macro geographies; texts often acknowledge such mass cultural rhetoric while at the same time offering a more nuanced and optimistic appraisal of the potential for meaningful engagement with the marketplace. Texts such as Norman Foster’s Woman on the Run, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” attribute postwar boredom to passive, diversionary consumption habits that mediate and inhibit the consumer’s ability to find fulfillment within local environments. By scrutinizing setting, characterization, narration, and other formal concerns within the context of boredom theory and Michael de Certeau’s spatial phenomenology, it becomes clear that these texts encourage a mode of spatial and cultural literacy capable of revealing opportunities for meaningful engagement within local environments that remain vital.

This thesis examines the relationship between Southern literature and socio-cultural realities of the Southern region of the United States of America. Analyzing works of five distinguished Southern writers, this thesis examines the reflection of specific Southern culture features in literature of the region in the period from the end of the American Civil War to the second half of the 20th century. The thesis oppose the opinion that the primary goal of Southern literature was to promote Southern identity and its cultural superiority above the North. The central hypothesis, that is being verified by this thesis, is that despite the indisputable contribution of highly recognized Southern writers to building of Southern identity, these authors expressed in their works also often sharp critiques of the social conditions in the South.

No description available.

This thesis explores ideas of everydayness, the mundane, and the repetitive emptiness of consumer culture. It looks at the malaise that plagues everyday life and examines several attempts throughout history to break from its grips which revolve around a search for a more ideal state. This research includes utopias of modernism, the transcendental, the communal living of Shakers and Early Christians, ascetic monks and The Desert Fathers. These ideas have shaped my studio practice as I construct installations based on worlds which allude to the eternal, the otherworldly, and the fragility of our physical world when compared to more eternal spiritual archetypes.

No description available.