Robert Cooper and I met at a vast Midwestern university as graduate students in a doctoral program. I am a Southerner by birth and am now a professor in Virginia. Cooper is a Southerner by choice after having accepting a professorship at McNeese University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he has lived, taught for decades, […]
“GNOSTIC VIBES—REVISITING WALKER PERCY’S ‘LOVE IN THE RUINS'” (Part II)
—All Percy quotations from Walker Percy, Love In The Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), first edition/first printing Essay by Louis Gallo Dr. More thinks of his lapsometer as “the first caliper of the soul” which can scientifically measure the […]
Gnostic Vibes: Revisiting Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins” (Part I)
Essay by Louis Gallo All Percy quotations from Walker Percy, Love In The Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), first edition/first printing. The protagonist of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, the “Bad Catholic” of the novel’s subtitle, is a […]
“From Self-Reliance to Loss of Sovereign Self: The Ghost of Emerson in Walker Percy’s Fictional Poetics”
Essay by Louis Gallo We rarely associate the names of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walker Percy, yet both deal with common philosophic and social concerns which make it clear that Percy, like so many writers following Emerson, can be examined from the perspective of Transcendentalism in general and self-reliance in particular. However remote Percy’s sensibility may […]