Religion and Sexuality in Walker Percy, William Gass, and John Updike: Metaphors of Embodiment in the Androcentric Imagination

The 1960s saw the triumph of cognitive science over behaviorism. This chapter examines three literary–philosophical objections to this shift: “West Coast” phenomenology, Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, and the writings of Walker Percy, the first of the postwar sages featured in this book. For “West Coast” philosophers, cognitive science ignores the way human action is structured by what we “give a damn” about—a sense of significance that orients our actions. Powers’s novel goes a step further: no more than machines do we know what to give a damn about. Percy’s essays and fiction challenge both these positions, asking us to see analogies between the significance we find in language and the significance we find in living a Christian life. Establishing such an analogy is the goal of Percy’s 1971 Love in the Ruins, which seeks to embody—with only partial success—what terms such as “faith” and “community” might mean.

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Book Review Walker Percy: A life By Patrick H. Samway. 506 pp. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. $35. 0-374-18735-5

New England Journal of Medicine ◽

10.1056/nejm199710303371819 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 337 (18) ◽

pp. 1326-1326

Author(s):

Scott D. Boyd

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Walker Percy

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VICTORIAN WOMAN’S POETRY

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150399272245 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 601-609 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Linda Shires

Keyword(s):

Poetic Tradition ◽

Subject Positions ◽

Michael Field ◽

Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽

Religion And Sexuality

PART OF THE EXCITEMENT of reading Victorian woman’s poetry lies in its manifold refusals to adopt wholesale the codes and conventions of the male poetic tradition. Such refusal may manifest itself in the bold rewriting of forms (as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese), or in the unhinging of domestic or romantic pieties through irony and other doubling strategies (as in Dora Greenwell’s “Scherzo” or Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret”). Both the rewriting of male forms and the attack on conventional ideologies opened up new subject positions for women. For example, women’s responses to poetic tradition and to each other’s work initially made use of expressive theory to explore sexual and religious passions simultaneously (as in the poetry of the Brontës), while towards the end of the century, when religion and sexuality were not so inextricably intertwined, women could openly celebrate non-hierarchical sexualities (as in the lesbian poems of Michael Field).

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