The Literary Relationships of Robert Coles and Walker Percy: An American Search for Meaning

EDWIN MELLEN PRESS

Edward Francisco

The literary relationship of physicians Robert Coles and Walker Percy may be one of the most important connections in the history of modern American letters. This book not only captures a friendship or union of like minds, but it synthesizes approaches pointing to a new science of "thirdness," one accounting for the triadic nature of human beings as sign maker-receivers. The book advances both man's quest to locate a science capable of uniting fields of knowledge and reconciling Cartesian dualism. And understanding how their orientations toward language and being combined to provide the blueprint for constructing a science of semiotic, or sign making, subsuming all science.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Robert Coles
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Moviegoer and a Meeting of Minds
• Chapter 2: Semiotics and a Theory of Human Beings
• Chapter 3: Percy's Novels and the Anti-hero’s Quest
• Chapter 4: Doing Documentary Work and the Scientific Method
• Chapter 5: Musings on Percy and Coles' Investigation of Semiotics and the Role of Storytelling
• Chapter 6: The Mind's Fate
• Chapter 7: Lost in the Cosmos
• Chapter 8: Walker Percy: An American Search
• Chapter 9: Walker Percy, Semiotics, and an Emerging Science of Thirdness
Work Cited

Edward Francisco is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Pellissippi State College in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is a member of the Oxford Roundtable at the University of Oxford, England.

Publication Date: 2016

Pages: 336