Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Brian A. Smith is associate professor and deputy chair in the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University.Smith’s book has excellent insights on Percy’s relevance to race, social science, and philosophy.
Christianity Today
<p>Brian A. Smith’s Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer is an extraordinary exploration of the writings of a sadly underappreciated observer of the American soul. . . . Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer is a significant accomplishment and deserves careful reading. Smith has the uncanny ability to weave the disparate threads of Percy’s writings into a cogent narrative understandable even to those less familiar with the author’s work. . . . As for Smith’s work, perhaps the greatest among its many<br />merits is that it whets the appetite just enough to entice readers to revisit Percy’s novels yet again.</p>
Interpretation
This is an elegant and meticulous presentation of the political thought in existential context of America's most original and deepest thinker of the 20th century. It's obviously the result of years of reflection, and it might well be the best book ever published on Walker Percy. Smith, in fact, has not just written a book on this philosopher-novelist, but on the truth about who we are and what we're supposed to do.
- Peter Augustine Lawler, Berry College,
Walker Percy is one of America’s great novelists, and he ought to be known as a political thinker as well. In Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer, Brian A. Smith makes the case that we should understand Percy’s novels and essays together as a guide to living in a complex world.
Percy cultivated a philosophical and literary approach that revealed the fault lines in the modern mind. He portrayed man as a wayfarer: peristantly unsatisfied and wandering in search of a perfectly complete solution to life’s dilemmas. His writing captures the restlessness of the human heart and allows us to comprehend our temptation to escape our sense of alienation and longing. Drawing ideas from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature, Percy’s multidimensional account of American political life shows the ways that today’s approaches to life often fall short and leave us more unsatisfied with ourselves and others than ever.
Percy hoped we would evade the temptations to escape the life of the wayfarer and accept our misplaced longings, alienation, depression, and anxiety as part of the human condition. Failing to do this might lead us to accept ever more extreme political and social ideas as the basis for life. The promise of embracing Percy’s political teaching is that we might then be able to accept ourselves as we really are in order to join with others in authentic community.
Chapter 1: The Mishmash Theory of Man
Chapter 2: On the Cult of the Expert and the Dangers of Scientism
Chapter 3: Individualism, Community, and the Longing for Place
Chapter 4: Stoicism and the Honor-Bound South
Chapter 5: Dreaming of the End Times
Chapter 6: Toward a New Social Science
Chapter 7: Percy’s Vision of Family, Community, and Faith
The Politics, Literature, & Film series is an interdisciplinary examination of the intersection of politics with literature and/or film. The series is receptive to works that use a variety of methodological approaches, focus on any period from antiquity to the present, and situate their analysis in national, comparative, or global contexts. Politics, Literature, & Film seeks to be truly interdisciplinary by including authors from all the social sciences and humanities, such as political science, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, history, religious studies, and law. The series is open to both American and non-American literature and film. By putting forth bold and innovative ideas that appeal to a broad range of interests, the series aims to enrich our conversations about literature, film, and their relationship to politics.
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