Literature, Persons, and Modern Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Literary criticism was an essential tool in Voegelin’s approach to understanding the unfolding of human experience in time and its relationship to politics. This attention to history as “the unfolding of the human Psyche” is particularly important given that literature in the 19th and 20th centuries provided new explorations and expressions of the inner depth of the person. This literature, in turn, was a way to resist the dehumanizing elements of modern politics: calculation, scientism, social atomism, and totalitarianism. The papers in this session explore both of these modern innovations, literature as an attempt to put into words the complex inner world of the person and the use of those expressions as a way of forcing states, political actors, and institutions to recognize persons as the origin and end of politics.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Eric Voegelin Society

Individual Presentations

• Eric Voegelin and Walker Percy: The Political Problem of “Post-Christian” Life - Matalyn Elizabeth Vander Bleek, The Catholic University of America

• The Inward Turn of the Transcendentalists: Hawthorne’s Inscapes Into the Person - John McNerney, Catholic University of America

• Karol Wojtyla and Vaclav Havel: The Unifying Effect of the Human Person - Carly Elizabeth Jones, The Catholic University of America

• Deplorable Political Consciousness in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground - Thomas Hutchinson

Chair

• David M. Sollenberger Penn State University

Discussants

• Carol B Cooper University of Houston

• David M. Sollenberger Penn State University