Product Code: H891
ISBN: 9780881465020
Price: $35.00
John Updike once wrote that many of his works are "illustrations of Kierkegaard," and yet no current study provides an extended, convincing reason why this is so, why Updike came to live by Søren Kierkegaard's ideas. This study does, telling the story of Updike's life-altering encounter with Fear and Trembling in his early career, and tracing the subsequent evolution of Updike's complex and coherent theology.
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Product Code: H903
ISBN: 9780881465280
Price: $35.00
In the fifty years since her death, Flannery O’Connor studies have been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the South and the Church of Rome. This work challenges the conception of O’Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism by problematizing the “Southern Gothic” trope, positing a non-canonical Southern realism, and repositioning O’Connor as essentially ecumenical in her private theology. The study contextualizes O’Connor’s work within the American scene by detailing the varied political and literary histories of the “North” and “South” as well as opposing the notion of region-specific aesthetics and a native anti-realist mode in the South.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P515
ISBN: 9780881465419
Price: $35.00
What does it mean to become a human being? This question was persistently repeated by Kierkegaard scholar Howard V. Hong (1912–2010) to students during his forty-year tenure at St. Olaf College. As one of Dr. Hong’s students, Jamie Lorentzen never forgot the question—one that always pointed to the ethical upbuilding of individuals.
Lorentzen’s Kierkegaard studies inform commentary on how central characters in four works of literature help readers answer Howard Hong’s question.
Twain’s Huck Finn becomes human by being an unwitting ethicist despite himself and the pro-slavery culture in which he was reared. Ishmael and Queequeg’s embrace of the neighbor and outcast in Melville’s Moby-Dick is an ethical counterpoint to Ahab’s terrifying narcissism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s famous narcissist, Peer Gynt, offers an archetypal negative ethical model for becoming human. Finally, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov show how ethics informs human development in both secular and religious cultures.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H852
ISBN: 9780881463880
Price: $29.00
Author and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams argues that a lack of connection to the land is the direct result of our failure to care intimately about one another. From PIECES OF WHITE SHELL: A JOURNEY TO NAVAJOLAND (1984) to WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS: FIFTY-FOUR VARIATIONS ON VOICE (2012), her writing is born in the red-hot fires of contradiction. A Mormon and a believer in the power of women, an activist and a solitary writer, a student of science and a woman of faith, Williams celebrates paradox and lives both on the page and in the world.
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By author: Aristotle Translated by: David Bolotin
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H959
ISBN: 9780881466638
Price: $45.00
David Bolotin's translation of Aristotle's DE ANIMA, or ON SOUL, aims above all at fidelity to the Greek. It treats Aristotle as a teacher regarding what soul really is, and hence it tries to convey the meaning--to the extent possible in English---of his every word. The translation itself is supplemented with footnotes, some of which, when taken together, sketch the outline of an overall interpretation of the work. For readers--including those who may already know some Greek--who wish to study DE ANIMA with care, it offers access that has hitherto been unavailable in English to the precise meaning of Aristotle's text.
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By author: Aristotle Translated by: David Bolotin
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P575
ISBN: 9780881466645
Price: $18.00
David Bolotin's translation of Aristotle's DE ANIMA, or ON SOUL, aims above all at fidelity to the Greek. It treats Aristotle as a teacher regarding what soul really is, and hence it tries to convey the meaning--to the extent possible in English--of his every word. The translation itself is supplemented with footnotes, some of which, when taken together, sketch the outline of an overall interpretation of the work. For readers--including those who may already know some Greek--who wish to study DE ANIMA with care, it offers access that has hitherto been unavailable in English to the precise meaning of Aristotle's text.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P573
ISBN: 9780881466799
Price: $18.00
DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE? is a unique study of the earliest recorded "discourses" of the Buddha, taking an approach that is at once psychological, philosophical, and literary. In a market abundant with how-to books for spiritual practitioners and advice for achieving a happy life by Buddhist masters, this book offers original readings of some of the most powerful of the Buddha's teachings, which take the form of conversations with a wide range of people: disciples, wandering Hindu philosophers, Brahmin white supremacists, ordinary householders, and even a tyrant. It is a book for all literate, thoughtful people who want to read for themselves what the Buddha really said and to understand their own condition better.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H971
ISBN: 9780881466966
Price: $35.00
An innovative book, WHEN FICTION AND PHILOSOPHY MEET explores the intersection between the philosophy of Simone Weil from Paris, France, and the fiction of Flannery O’Connor from the Southern state of Georgia, USA. In an era of war, of unprecedented human displacements, and of ethnic, racial, and religious fears the ideas of these two intellectuals bear on our present condition.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H974
ISBN: 9780881467048
Price: $35.00
IN COLD BLOOD remains one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century, a study of crime and a polemic against capital punishment that is without peer. Truman Capote purportedly considered it the “first nonfiction novel,” ushering in the era of New Journalism, as defined by Tom Wolfe. It also was the catalyst for a century of crime reporting in America, and crime coverage is by definition popular, involving heightened dramatic conflict, human interest, and questions of morality. The study focuses upon the voices left out of IN COLD BLOOD, which Capote wrote during his whirlwind race to an imaginary finish line.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P583
ISBN: 9780881467062
Price: $30.00
THE INCARNATIONAL ART OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR argues that O’Connor designed a unique asthetic to defy the Gnostic dualisms that characterize American intellectual and spiritual life. Focusing on stories with artist figures, objets d’art, child protagonists, and embodied images, Lake describes how O’Connor’s fiction actively resists romantic theories of the imagination and religious life by highlighting the epistemological necessity of the body. Ultimately O’Connor challenges the romantic and modern notion of the artist as a fire-stealing Prometheus and replaces it with a notion of the artist as a locally committed craftsman.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H975
ISBN: 9780881467086
Price: $29.00
SYMBOL AND EXISTENCE will prove fascinating to Walker Percy scholars and fans who wish to decipher Percy’s authentic philosophical stance. Percy, an existentialist Catholic at his core, was also a scientist seeking an objective paradigm to portray his views. SYMBOL AND EXISTENCE demonstrates that Percy was quite methodical and logical in his thought and provides an entirely new perspective on his scholarship. Much of this book is unique and has never been published before; however, some sections were revised and published as isolated journal articles or book chapters, never presented as the unified whole that Percy intended. The orderly unity of Percy’s work has not previously been accessible to scholars and fans.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H984
ISBN: 9780881467406
Price: $35.00
Flannery O'Connor is unique in that she is not only familiar with seventeenth-century emblematic representations of scriptural truth, but she is also knowledgeable of the conventions of twentieth-century art forms. Her characters are illuminated by textual images formulated from the juxtaposition of scripture, seventeenth- and twentieth-century archetypes, and street detritus that inhabits pictorial sequences exceeding the boundaries of time and diachronically upending O'Connor's narrative world.
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