Subject: Re: The Importance of Ernest Being
From: Brannon Costello (BrannonC1@AOL.COM)
Date: Mon Jul 19 1999 - 13:55:54 EDT
Thomas and List--
I'm finding this Hemingway/Percy/Bellow thread fascinating--certainly among
the most engaging since I've been lurking. A comment on Thomas's assertion of
Percy's non-maturation as a novelist: I would probably agree that The
Thanatos Syndrome's treatment of Kierkegaard's doesn't sufficiently advance
The Moviegoer's, although to be honest what little I know of Kierkegaard
comes mostly filtered through Percy, so I'm hardly an expert there. However,
I think it's a mistake to automatically equate a (possible) failure to
develop the Kierkegaardian aspects of his fiction with a complete lack of
development over the course of his novelistic career. Although the
dramatization of Kierkegaard's theories obviously plays a substantial role in
Percy's fiction, there are, of course, other things going on there, other
threads that, if followed, reveal a marked maturation from one novel to the
next--race and racial identity, for instance, and I'm sure there are others
as well. While he may not necessarily show a steady growth as a
Kierkegaardian novelist (and again, I'm not particularly qualified to speak
here--others who know more than I might be able to champion his
Kierkegaardian credentials more forcefully), he definitely demonstrates
growth as a novelist, no qualifying adjective. As far as how his work stacks
up against Bellow's--I'll let the list hash that out :).
I suppose I should give myself a proper introduction, now that I've left
lurk-dom behind: I'm Brannon Costello, and I'll be beginning my PhD work in
English at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in the fall. I recently
finished up my MA at the University of Southern Mississippi (in Hattiesburg,
MS, that LITR's notorious Knothead refuge), where I wrote a thesis on (as you
may have surmised) race and racial identity in Percy's novels, an important
aspect of his fiction that has gone relatively unexamined. Other than that,
life is pretty non-descript: one wife, two cats, lots of books :)
And Jon Cusack should play Binx.
Best,
BC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Thu Jan 11 2001 - 12:52:17 EST