[A teacher] can’t put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those roadblocks removed from its path. If you don’t think cheaply, then there at least won’t be the quality of cheapness in your writing, even though you might not be able to write well. ”
—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
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Percyscapes: The Fugue State in Twentieth-Century Southern Fiction. LSU Press. Louisiana State University Press.
“LSU Press is one of the oldest and most prestigious academic presses in the South.”
<www.lsu.edu/lsupress>
Sample Reviews
"By using forms and techniques from semiotic, philosophic, and new critical traditions, and borrowing terminology from psychology and music, Rudnicki distills a mode of existence from Walker Percy's fiction that advances current ideas about alienation, from intellectual exile to the experience it more closely resembles in daily life. . . .Rudnicki's method is interesting and engaging [and] formalist without sacrificing social implications."
--American Literature
“[Rudnicki] redefines ‘classic’ as a work that leads the reader now here, now there, on the road, but conscious of fugitive exile and the desire to pattern it”
