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Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer

Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer cover

Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer

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Description

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.

Table of Contents

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

Product details

Published Aug 04 2017
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Extent 230
ISBN 9781498537551
Imprint Lexington Books
Series Politics, Literature, & Film
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

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Bloomsbury Collections

This book is available on Bloomsbury Collections where your library has access.

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