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Following are some papers I've written; their links will take you to their abstracts.
Some of their abstract titles will link to the whole paper.
LITERARY ANALYSES:
PHILOSOPHY AND LITERARY THEORY: Language Theory
PHILOSOPHY AND LITERARY THEORY: Art Theory
PHILOSOPHY AND LITERARY THEORY: Critiques of Materialism, Hard Determinism, Behaviorism
FEMINIST THEORY:
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
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ON EDUCATION:
Presented at the Midwest Conference on Christianity and Literature, "Intersections of the Sacred and Profane," in March of 2001:
The paper considers T. S. Eliot's concept of the dance, residing at the center of the still point, as the controlling symbol with which Eliot describes the experience of the incarnation -- the divine, spiritual infusion into earthly activity. Dance is a highly structured, ordered activity; instead of random, meaningless physical actions, each individual movement ties with all the other movements to create a whole that is harmonious within itself, as well as outside itself (with the music). The image of the dance, repeated many times throughout the poem, resonates on many levels to indicate the redeeming presence of the eternal in the material and transitory world, representing the mystical union of the soul with God that gives meaning and beauty to an otherwise purely physical realm. Its harmony and rhythm and order symbolize the cosmic order of the universe; the dance is intimate connection, not alienation, because the dancer is usually accompanied by others, in synchronicity.
Two important passages in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets that focus on the dance are (1) the still point of the wheel in "Burnt Norton" and (2) the peasants' matrimonial dance in "East Coker". Both portray the eternal presence imbuing significance to daily activities; however, "Burnt Norton's" abstract dance at the still point is universally acknowledged as redemptive while the "East Coker" dance scene, because of its earthy, this-worldly characteristics, is often misunderstood as unredeemed and meaningless rather than what it is: a joyful incarnation affirming time and place.
Presented at Georgia State University's "Doctoral Colloquium," April, 2000, and DeVry University's "Faculty Forum," June 2000. Accepted to Coleridge Summer Conference, Somerset, England.
This paper examines Coleridge's perenially mysterious and puzzling Rime of the Ancient Mariner and offers a new explanation. Is RAM just a fantasy poem for mere entertainment, like a meaningless roll of the dice, just as life seems to be? Or is it replete with religious and moral messages of sin, guilt, and punishment? Coleridge says "no" to all these interpretations; his prescient world view was one that rejected any paradigm, system, or truth, and is one that conceives of life as seemingly chaotic and undecipherable, much like current postmodern society. Yet Coleridge gives the Mariner, and the reader, a call to action in his poem: while we cannot "know" or interpret the world and its events, and so cannot judge, we can "love" through the Romantic idea of imagination and feeling.
This proposal was presented at the Conference on Christianity and Literature,
"Voices Far and Near: Myth, Legend, Folktale, and Fantasy," October 2002,
Brooklyn Heights, New York
Walker Percy -- contemporary novelist, doctor, scientist, philosopher, Christian existentialist -- spent much of his life and his fiction and non-fiction writing deliberating on a "Theory of Man" or a "radical anthropology," as he variously called it. Popular thought views the nature of humanity through the lens of Cartesian dualism, or as a "ghost in a machine," a spirit in a body, composed of two entirely different substances. Scientists and other intellectuals are often materialists -- seeing a human being as a purely physical substance, solely subject to and explainable by the scientific laws of physics and biology.
Percy's unique view of man is "monist," in that he perceives man as one substance, but not reducible to a physicalist stance. Percy rejects Descartes' dualism, but does not embrace the popular and usual alternative of physicalism. For Percy, the human being is more than just an organism [re]acting in an environment, as the behaviorists would have him - a victim of cause and effect, if you will. Humanity is qualitatively different from animals, which, in Percy's view, operate solely by instinct, without "consciousness."
The difference between man and the animals is his capacity for language, which is nothing more than man's unique ability to do commerce in symbols. Percy writes, "The truth is that man's capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is.intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness." (29), and for Percy, commerce in symbols is not a dyadic stimulus-response event that can be explained by behaviorist theory - it can't be explained as a space-time event or as a succession of energy states. This is, for Percy, a "shattering of the old dream of the Enlightenment - that an objective-explanatory-causal science can discover and set forth all the knowledge of which man is capable..Man is not merely a higher [purely biological] organism responding to and controlling his environment. He is, in Heidegger's words, that being in the world whose calling it is to find a name for Being, to give testimony to it, and to provide for it a clearing" (158).
As a trained medical doctor with a high respect for science, Percy does not wish to throw out the scientific method altogether. But he explains its inadequacy and contradictions when used as the sole attempt to explain who and what man is - as well as the limitations of current cultural anthropology and semiotics. Why do current anthropological and semiotic theories (operating primarily on the behaviorist model) fail to adequately describe the nature of man? Simply because, while they adequately account for cause-effect actions, responses to stimuli, survival and instinctual behavior, they do not explain symbol. Percy writes, "A sign-using organism takes account only of those elements of its environment which are relevant biologically.but a symbol-using organism has a world" (202). A world entails "naming," and explanations for events, for what happened yesterday, for what happened "in the beginning," and has no "gaps." A world has myths. "Chickens have no myths" (202), Percy explains. He writes:
The greatest difference between the environment(Umwelt) of the sign-using organism and the world (Welt) of the speaking organism is that there are gaps in the former but none in the latter. The non-speaking organism only notices what is relevant biologically; the speaking organism disposes of the entire horizon symbolically. Gaps that cannot be closed by perception and reason are closed by magic and myth.
Walker Percy was, throughout his life, fascinated with the exploration of who and what man is, and with the exploration of those things that would explain that - such as language. His nearly fatal illness (tuberculosis) in his twenties made him acutely aware of mortality and the transience of life in the physical world, but his medical training gave him the logical tools and respect for science with which to examine the philosophical issues that arose for him because of that. As a scientist, existentialist and converted, devout Catholic, he stood at the fulcrum of the intersection of science and religion, able to speak on both topics and use each to understood the other.
While it is commonly known that Percy's philosophy is heavily Kierkegaardian, in his theory of symbol and language to develop his radical anthropology, he draws widely from many sources, especially from Ernst Cassirer and his studies of language, thought, and reality.
(All references from: Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1975.)
Walker Percy holds that language, knowing, and being are integrally and irreducibly related, and that one affects the other. To generalize grossly, Percy theorizes that one may adopt different "postures" relative to any given sentence, and that this posture is bound up with (a) one's situation in the world, and (b) the demeanor and authority of the speaker, and (c) the mode in which the sentence is presented
Relative to Percy's theory, Jenkins' article bears the message that one of Percy's themes in his novels is that the language of the church has become empty and cliched, and so now has become powerless and meaningless, echoing its inability to understand its own message, that of love, and its inability to convey that message to others. This is tied up in the ontological state of the people (the church members) using the language, as well as the opinion of those receiving the message of the bearers of the message. Throughout Percy's novels he shows that love is a foreign concept in postmodern American society, and that the American Christian church, both Protestant and Catholic, has more of a social function than a spiritual function, and fails to bring the idea of love into the lives of its people. It does not know God, nor does it know how to introduce God to others. Jenkins quotes Percy in an interview: "[American Christians] generally practice the same brand of brotherhood as the local country club. If Jesus Christ showed up at the Baptist church in Plains, the deacons would call the cops" (155, qtd. in Lawson and Kramer, 174).
Therefore, the church can no longer communicate its message because of (a) its epistemological and ontological status, that is, not knowing the message in either mind or soul, and (b) the perceived demeanor and authority of the speakers of the message, the church, by the receiver of the message, the American public. In other words, the socio-cultural situation of the majority of the American public is that of lack of respect in the authority of the church, so it cannot hear the message. The message, communication, and language are inextricably bound up with the cultural context of the speakers and listeners. Thus, those few that can hear the message, do so because their cultural background inclines them to accept those words as viable and meaningful utterances.
This study consists of choosing ten typically used phrases (called "set phrases") one hears from the American Christian church, such as "Jesus died for your sins," or "God is love," or "Jesus is my saviour," asking a diverse selection of people what they feel the meaning of those phrases are, expecting to also elicit how they feel about those phrases. Their biographical information is included for a cursory determination of their cultural context, such as ages, where they are from, gender, race, religion, and how often they attend religious services. If Percy's theory and Jenkins' exposition of that are correct, the interviewees' reaction and interpretation of these phrases should be closely linked to (a) their socio-cultural context, and (b) their attitudes toward religious affiliation and the church (the demeanor and authority of the speaker in their eyes). These expectations were confirmed in this study.
(References to above authors:
Jenkins, Bill. "Language, Love and the American Church in the Novels of Walker
Percy." Southern Studies. 4:2. (Summer 1993): pp. 141-156.
Hobson, Linda Whitney. "Interview with Walker Percy." More Conversations with Walker Percy. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, Eds. Jackson: Univ. of Mississippi, 1993. pp. 84-102.
Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1975.)
The perennial question of what constitutes "art" is considered in this paper.
Examining primarily Ben Jonson's "On My First Son," and Milton's attempt to imitate it in "On the Death of a Fair Child Dying of a Cough," the topic of what makes "good art" and "bad art" is also considered.
When Dorothy traipses through the land of Oz, encoutering witches, Munchkins, forest beasts, and other odd creatures, but searching for the Wizard who will lead her home, she is accompanied by three companions: a Scarecrow, hoping the Wizard will give him a Brain so he can think intelligently; a Tinman, hoping the Wizard will endow him with a Heart, so that he can feel; and a cowardly Lion, seeking Courage of the Wizard. Were The Wizard of Oz written today, however, Dorothy would have just one companion on her obstacle filled journey home (besides Toto, of course), and that would be the Scarecrow.
The Scarecrow's Brain is what we want today; the Timan's Heart and the Lion's Courage are of little consequence to us. We see that in our politics; we se that in our businesses; we see that in our science; and worst of all, we see that in our universities. There may be some individuals scattered throughout the educational system who have Heart and Courage, who teach Heart and Courage, but the educational system as a whole has little use for Heart and Courage any more, and those who think it should be in the university must now fight a battle to keep it there.
The above is the beginning of a paper that argues for the value of art education and "General Education" in a scientific, materialist, postmodern, consumer-oriented capitalist world. IE: America today.
God is Dead, according to sixties' theologians (though Nietzsche said it first). The Author is Dead, according to Roland Barthes. Art is dead, according to some contemporary art theorists. In the contemporary world, "reality" itself is dead. Using the second law of thermodynamics, language theory (Saussure, Culler), and contemporary literary theorists (Derrida), this paper examines human inability to perceive and connect with the real world, which is always mediated through sign, symbol and chosen paradigm, and the human need to construct an arbitrarily imposed system or view of the world onto it for mere survival. While we can never have assurance or guarantee that any system or perception of reality is accurate, these are still necessary as they enable us to function.
Freud's concept of the "uncanny" (briefly: "coincidence"), a materialist and deterministic one, as Freud was, is contrasted with Carl Jung's similiar concept of "synchronicity." Freud uses the "uncanny" to support his materialist, causal paradigm while Jung uses the same phenomenon, different name, to support the opposite. The experience of the "uncanny" is metaphorical in that it repeats the concept; in Jung's concept, it has metonymic quality in that presses forward, goes deeper, though is able to do that by the fact that it is a metaphor. Narrative as "uncanny," in terms of repetition of familiar or the known, is considered, as well as its metonymic and metaphorical aspects.
The ongoing free will vs. determinism debate is one of the most difficult to resolve; the same evidence supports each side. Applying the idea of "Chaos Theory" in physics, which finds general patterns predictable but individual actions of particular particles random and unpredictable, one can offer an alternative to the "hard determinst" stance.
Mysticism's generally agreed upon characteristics include: a sense of undifferientated unity, of transcendence of space and time, of positive moods, of noetic incorrigibility, of paradoxicality, of ineffability, of transience, and of positive changes in attitude of behavior. Also, it is generally agreed that the mystical experience occurs universally across time, space, culture, and religious paradigm. However, there are some experiences which have many or all of these qualities, such as an especially positive drug trip (such as experiences with "Ecstasy" and LSD are described), or that of an athlete or artist deeply immersed in their pursuits (also known as "flow"), or religious ecstasies produced by sensory bombardment (music, drugs, dancing, sexual activity, suffusion in beauty) or sensory deprivation (fasting, flagellation, other forms of physical penance). Are these a full-fledged and "true" mysticism? If not, why not?
Examining the works of the Catholic mystics: Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila, I add four other characteristics to mysticism to differentiate a true metaphysical union with God from experiences that merely mimic the symptoms of such a union. The authentic mystical experience should be characterized by an emphasis on: (1) the necessity for preparation of the soul into a state of readiness (often taking years and decades of work), (2) the denial of the senses, self, and ego, often characterized by suffering, (3) the primacy of the fruits of the experience, not the feeling of the experience, and (4) the primacy of the union/relationship with God, not the feeling of the experience.
After briefly reviewing a definition of consciousness and some popular and widely held theories regarding consciousness, this paper discuss the limitations of the scientific method and the materialist, empirical assumptions that dominate the Western worldview, causing some theories of consciousness to be preferred over others -- specifically behaviorism, physicalism, or even Cartesian dualism. A discussion is given of anomalistic cases of conscious experience that are outside or exceptions to normal conscious experience, and for most, also exceptions to a purely physical view of the universe. Next through closely examining one of these cases, religious mysticism, specifically that of Buddhism, and showing its similarities to quantum theory and the theory of relativity, I discuss a theory of consciousness that sees matter and energy, body and "mind" (or soul), as a field of forces interacting with one another, the exact substance of which we do not have full knowledge.
Althusser, a Marxist, defines "ideology" and determines that ALL is ideology, except science, and the individual is always subject to ideology, since nothing is outside ideology but science and reality. Philosophical and religious traditions, especially Christianity, take a fair beating in Althusser's paradigm which discounts and subsumes them into his definition of ideology. This paper reverses the act and subsumes Althusser's concept of ideology into a larger, religious paradigm: Using a spiritual and ethical developmental theory it says that Althusser is a "Stage Three" (independent thinker, scientist) liberated from the restrictive "Stage Two" (conformist). While many aspects of church and religion are "Stage Two," and Althusser correctly identifies them as so, they also connect on a deeper level to "Stage Four" which Althusser fails to see. Stage Four transcends science and physical reality. The success of this paper depends upon with whom you consider the burden of proof lies - with Althusser or with myself.
A Critique of Arguments for Materialism
A Justification of Intuition as Valid Epistemological Method
Romance novels are the "hottest" thing in publishing: they dominate 40% of the paperback market. While often considered badly written escapism, this feminist examination of the trend considers deeper reasons for their popularity. Do the novels imprison the readers (often already miserable in marriages and social and work relationships defined by power traditionally invested in men to dominate and subdue women) by maintaining culturally and socially imposed expectations of female subordination? Or do they offer an affirmation of the archetypal feminine by showing the heroine winning her goal (of marriage) and metaphorically subduing the hero into social obedience and passivity in a patriarchal society? Also considered is the success of the "Alpha Male" hero in the romance market, as opposed to the failure of the "Alan Alda" male. Also, the question of whether these novels constitute "art" is considered. No conclusion is drawn other than that they cannot be arbitrarily condemned as oppressive pabulum, and further investigation is needed.
The Next Stage of Feminism: Acknowledging the Biological Imperative and Resurrecting the Mother
This examination of feminism begins with differentiating "constructionist feminism" (male and female as really the same other than basic bodily differences; society artificially constructs gender differences) from "essentialist feminism" (females really do have distinct biological and psychological differences from males, but feminine attributes, normally disparaged, should instead be considered as equal, valued and valuable as masculine traits.) I write from an "essentialist" viewpoint.
While feminism and the feminist movement has done much good for women in society, it also has created some problems. Because we live in a patriarchal society, with masculine values, feminism has operated to make males out of females in order to give value to traditionally unvalued females, rather than to acknowledge feminine attributes and feminine roles as commensurate and as important as masculine ones. This is the root of the contemporary phenomenon of both mother and father at work, and no one is at home with the children (the feminine role). On a practical level, it means that while the woman can now be "man" or "father" in that she can go to work in equal positions of the man, she often does double duty as the "mother," (mother, maid, cook), creating more work. This is because while women can be men, men are not socially allowed to be women. (Sociologically, it is considered acceptable for members of the inferior group to take on characteristics of members of the superior group, but it is unacceptable and even outrageously humorous for members of the superior group to take on charactersitics of the inferior group. Thus, women can wear pants but we laugh at men wearing dresses. Women CEO's impress us; male housewives are oddities.) So feminism, in an attempt to liberate females, has ironically, subtlely and insidiously subjugated, opressed and eliminated "the feminine" (ie: roles, qualities and characteristics) in our social structure and personalities.
The solution is resurrect the feminine, enabling it to be valued (which it never has been in Western society), allowing both males and females to exhibit feminine qualities and participate in feminine roles, just as has already occurred with masculine qualities and roles.
A Jungian View of Paradise Lost: Eve and Satan as the rejected "yin" principle
Milton's patriarchal and Western worldview, with its need for heirarchy and order, portrays Eve in Paradise Lost as inferior (second) and unreconciled to Adam, who is closer to God in the medieval and Renaissance concept of the "Great Chain of Being." Eve and her counterpart Satan (also second, but to God in the heavenly heirarchy) are therefore responsible for the Fall, due to their inferiority and "evil", and lead humankind astray. However, from an Eastern standpoint, reflected in Jungian and Taoist principles, it is Adam's failures to incorporate Eve, the woman, as an equal into his life, as well as his failures to incorporate the feminine qualities she represents, as an equal and integrated part in his soul and personality, that cause the Fall.
The text is cited to show Adam's treatment of Eve as, essentially, sexualized, a "dumb blonde," one mentally imcompetent to be his equal. She is considered unworthy of equal conversation with him and the angel Raphael, and merely waits on them. Her value is constantly cited as primarily her reproductive capabilities: to biologically procreate the race and the future Saviour. Thus she is either "mother" or "bimbo" (others might say, madonna or whore) but not one acknowledged as a whole personality, just as Adam is not a whole personality without acknowledgement and use of his feminine attributes. In reality, Eve's knowledge, through intuiton and dreams, is proven to be accurate throughout, and had Adam only listened and acknowledged this "feminine" way of knowing as valid, the "Fall" could have been averted. Another feminine concept of knowing (Belenky 1986) is cited, that of "silence." The "evil" perceived in Satan and Eve is merely Adam's, and God's, and Milton's, fear and rejection of "the other."
In the end, this reading concludes that, spiritually and intellectually, Eve is always ahead of Adam: "The first shall be last, and the last, first." Milton's rejection of the feminine principle is subtle in Paradise Lost, but emerges fully ten years later in Samson Agonistes.
Female Repression in the Victorian Novel
Hamlet: A Textual Analysis of Act Two, Scene Two, lines 549-605
This paper was presented at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, December 2001, New Orleans, and accepted to the AAHE Conference on Faculty Roles and Rewards, January 2002.
This paper dwells primarily on the crisis in higher education that has been ongoing for thirty
years, and discusses some approaches to that problem. The Faculty Forum project is one of
the solutions: improving academic
cultures through a faculty development program of scholarship.
Alternative Professional Choices for the Ph.D. candidate:
Teaching in a For-Profit Technical School Environment
Presented at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, November 2001.
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