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Posts Tagged ‘John William Corrington’

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John William Corrington on the History of Gnosticism

In Arts & Letters, Books, Christianity, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Philosophy, Religion, Western Philosophy on March 20, 2019 at 6:45 am

In two essays from 1976, John William Corrington supplies his brief version of the history of Gnosticism. Both essays appear in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the book-cover image below:

The first essay examines how our empirical knowledge of the world, or experience, is necessarily bound up in the sum of our memory and interpretation of events and hence of our comprehension of history. Our experience is also an element of consciousness insofar as consciousness is the mind’s awareness of itself in relation to the phenomenal world.

The structure or makeup of consciousness is an ordered pattern of symbols. The structure of Gnostic consciousness is shaped by a hatred or dissatisfaction with the concrete reality of the world and an attempt to remake the world in the image of a false reality. Gnostic thought is regressive because it seeks to unite all things in an ideal state of unification that recalls the state of the infant in the womb whose radical break from the womb resulted in alienation and a sense of disorder.

In the second essay, Corrington points out that there have been many Gnostic schools and sects over time. The attempt to understand early Gnostics presupposes something innate or universal in the human condition because it necessarily involves a projection of our own experience and empirical knowledge of the world onto past figures, events, and modes of thought.

The Gnostics expressed in symbols their experiential knowledge of the divine that was a source of freedom from the hated reality of the concrete world. Corrington here maps different forms of Gnosticism and describes important Gnostic figures throughout various times and places. The structured symbols of Gnosticism that ordered Gnostic consciousness, he suggests, rectified the sense of alienation that derived from the unintelligibility and disorder of the cosmos.

Gnosticism considered ideal unity to be the desired end of empirical knowledge. The drive for ideal unity is evident in modern ideologies such as National Socialism, Marxist-Leninism, and other forms of totalitarianism that seek to realize an eschatological state of an eternally perfect order or ultimate reality here on earth. The Gnostic field of symbology fulfills a desire for perfect order or ultimate reality that has never been actualized concretely.

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John William Corrington on Gnosticism and Modern Thought

In Academia, American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Christianity, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, Scholarship, Southern History, The Academy, The South, Western Philosophy on December 12, 2018 at 6:45 am

Corrington delivered “Gnosticism and Modern Thought” as a lecture at a conference on Gnosticism (“Gnosticism and Modernity”) held at Vanderbilt University on April 27-29, 1978. The original version of this essay, located in the archives at Centenary College, consists of a typed document with handwritten pages at the end. An edited version of this essay appears in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the book-cover image below.

Corrington opens the essay with a reference to Nick Adams, a character from a short story by Ernest Hemingway who has established for himself an alternate, deformed sense of reality—a Second Reality—whereby he orders his experience. Corrington likens this Second Reality to the structure of consciousness accepted and propagated by Gnosticism. Corrington argues that the Gnostic acceptance of a false reality brought about an embrace of magic and fantasy, both of which the Gnostics used to order their social and political experience.

This perceived form of order is, in fact, disorder. Gnosticism is manifest in modern political movements, Corrington suggests, and it renews and reuses certain symbols to describe the nature of the world. It premises itself, moreover, on assumptions about the divine ability of man to achieve a unified, monistic, salvational telos on earth.

Gnosticism, which is part of an irrepressible drive for the divine that is common to each psyche, has a coherent ideational, narrative structure that makes its symbology appealing and plausible. Gnosticism is a symptom of the desire to achieve the symbolic return to the womb, a representation of paradise in which unity and perfection and order are attained. The Gnostic thus seeks to realize in the concrete world, by way of magic and other breaks from reality, the supposedly ultimate and eternal state in which pure, transcendent unity and monism are instantiated.

Corrington sees Gnosticism in the scientism of the modern era. If metaxy represents the proper understanding of the place of man and the divine on earth, the Second Reality, which the Gnostic chooses over metaxy, is a distorted teleological worldview. Corrington submits that more would be known about modern Gnostic tendencies in the form of ideology if there were not a breakdown of the disciplines into such compartments as history, science, political science, theology, psychology, and so on.

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John William Corrington on the Structure of Gnostic Consciousness

In Academia, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Christianity, Essays, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Scholarship, Southern History, The Academy, The South, Western Philosophy, Writing on December 5, 2018 at 6:45 am

John William Corrington wrote the essay “The Structure of Gnostic Consciousness” around the time he delivered his paper “Gnosticism and Modern Thought: A Way You’ll Never Be” at a conference titled “Gnosticism and Modernity,” held at Vanderbilt University on April 27-29, 1978.

“The Structure of Gnostic Consciousness” developed out “Gnosticism and Modern Thought” as a contribution that Corrington prepared for an edition that he and Richard Bishirjian were planning to publish after the Vanderbilt conference. The edition was never published because, according to Bishirjian, some of the contributors did not want to be associated with Mel Bradford, who was contributing a chapter to the book.

Corrington was involved in organizing the 1978 conference with Bishirjian and Eric Voegelin. Bishirjian would later relate that Voegelin considered Corrington’s paper to be the best that weekend. Among those participating in the conference was the literary critic Cleanth Brooks. Ellis Sandoz and Mel Bradford were also in attendance; Bradford delivered a paper and Sandoz moderated a panel.

“The Structure of  Gnostic Consciousness” in some ways summarizes Corrington’s philosophical interpretations of Gnosticism, political order, consciousness, myth, symbolism, the psyche, and knowledge. Corrington criticizes Gnosticism for failing to deal with reality as it is constituted in consciousness. The collapse of the Gnostic understanding of reality leads to disorder and confusion and the embrace of such things as magic that are at odds with a symbolic order emanating from a sound understanding of reality apprehended through consciousness. The Gnostic failure to comprehend reality generates delusional, ahistorical assumptions about the divinity of man and the ability of man to bring about a heaven on earth within history. Marxism is an example of a type of modern thinking that displays Gnostic elements.

The Gnostics felt alienated by and disenchanted with the cosmos as it exists in reality; they hated the real cosmos and remade it in the image of distorted, mythopoetic concepts whose symbology of disorder is mistaken for order. To achieve gnosis, or knowledge, is actually to accept a wrong and archaic mode of mythopoetic thought whereby magic is possible rather than beyond the realm of reality. This form of gnosis is attributable to Simon the Sorcerer or Simon the Magician, the Gnostic leader who is recounted briefly in the canonical Book of Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament.

Corrington discusses the work of the twelfth century mystic Joachim of Fiore, who exposited a millenarian view of history that influenced modern symbolic systems and consciousness which, according to Corrington, represent a divorce from earlier types of mythopoetic thinking. Joachim of Fiore rearticulated a Gnostic vision of earth and the cosmos, projecting eschatological salvation onto the concrete activities in which we are immersed and seeking to realize a heaven on earth within history. His notion of consciousness rendered a conceptual end to history, a fantasy in which the real is lost to a deformed system of symbolism whereby the natural desires of the psyche are satisfied by a false eschatology.

“The Structure of Gnostic Consciousness” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below:

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John William Corrington on Science, Symbol, and Meaning

In American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Essays, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on November 28, 2018 at 6:45 am

John William Corrington’s essay “Science, Symbol, and Meaning” (1983) is archived at Centenary College as “Houston Talk.” It was the opening address at the Second Annual Space Industrialization Conference of the National Space Society in Houston, Texas. It has been included in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on this image:

The subject of “Science, Symbol, and Meaning” is man’s exploration of outer space and the potential physical instantiation of certain theories about the structure of the cosmos. Corrington sets out to “reconstruct” Western culture, first by defining and describing it and then by diagnosing what he calls its “deformity,” which involves confusion regarding the differences between mythical and scientic modes of knowing.

This essay uses the subject of space exploration as a starting point for recommending remedies to this so-called deformity. Corrington purports to derive his thesis about time and cosmic order from Eric Voegelin, Martin Heidegger, and Giorgio de Santillana. He critiques the “illusion” that scientific thinking displaced mythopoetic thinking in the West because, he says, theological and symbolic thinking has been used to make sense of the data that has been objectively arrived at and disinterestedly gathered. This illusion will no longer stand, Corrington suggests, as the expanse of space becomes more intimately known to us and we begin to acknowledge the role that myth plays in ordering our experience within the observable cosmos.

Rationalism and empiricism are, Corrington suggests, themselves forms of myth about our ability to know the cosmos that we occupy.

Corrington emphasizes the limits of human knowledge and submits that modern science is, however useful, myth; science, he says, is not “co-extensive with the manifold of reality.” Science equips us with symbols that can be manipulated to structure and explain our thinking about the phenomenal universe.

The drive for the enterprise of space exploration, in his view, represents a repressed desire to know and order our experience; it is in this sense a structural element of our psyche, something that is not new to modernity but long felt and expressed. For this reason Corrington believes the “leap into space is the heritage and destiny of Western Man.” Corrington’s prescription, in light of his comments on space exploration, for  the “deformity” in Western thinking is as follows:

We must re-learn and carry to the heart the old verities that existed before the rise of metaphysics and science, the truths that were carried on and carried down through the mythological structure of the psyche: the unity of humanity and the cosmos, the illusory and ephemeral quality of the ego, the one law common to all that penetrates and encompasses the fine structure and the gross structure of reality.

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John William Corrington on a Rebirth of Philosophical Thought

In Academia, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Essays, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, Southern History, Writing on November 21, 2018 at 6:45 am

“A Rebirth of Philosophical Thought” is an essay by John William Corrington that appeared in The Southern Review in 1984. It opens by discussing the connection between Louisiana State University and Eric Voegelin and addresses the efforts of Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz to bring about a “rebirth” in philosophical thought, namely in premodern, mythopoetic forms of philosophizing.

Corrington calls Voegelin’s thought “an argument directed to the reader as spoudaios, the mature human being who, if he is capable of theoria, self-reflection, will be able to reconstitute in his own psyche the substance of what Voegelin has experienced in recollection from a past rendered opaque for most of us by some five hundred years of cultural destruction.”

For both Voegelin and Corrington, Nazism, Marxism, fascism, communism, and other totalizing ideologies of the twentieth century were the result of disordered philosophy and the divorce of modern thinking from its premodern antecedents for which humans had an innate longing, but from which they were alienated by modernity.

“A Rebirth of Philosophical Thought” provides helpful summaries of Voegelin’s most definitive theories, including his belief that modern disorder reveals symptoms of latent Gnosticism that has undergone dramatic but gradual change in light of the rise of Pauline Christianity with its various Greek influences.

“A Rebirth of Philosophical Thought” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below:

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John William Corrington on the Recovery of the Humanities

In Academia, America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Essays, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, Western Philosophy, Writing on November 7, 2018 at 6:45 am

John William Corrington wrote two essays on the recovery of the humanities, both of which are collected in my edition of his work, The Southern Philosopher. 

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The first of these originated as a lecture for the Southern Humanities Conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1984. Corrington sets out in that piece to define the “humanities” and to explain why he believes they need recovering. He argues that symbolism is essential to the humanities and that symbolism has been under assault since the Enlightenment.

Corrington believes that the Enlightenment ushered in an era of scientism and materialism that led to the rise of Nazism, Marxist-Leninism, secular humanism, and logical positivism, all of which contributed to the “decerebration” of the humanities. The task of recovering the humanities, according to Corrington, involves “the need to re­examine the fundamental experiences and symbols upon which any serious notion of the Humanities must be grounded, and to question our present understanding and application of those symbols.”

Corrington undertakes this task through the paradigms of Eric Voegelin, who frames his analysis in terms of the mythopoetic thought of certain peoples and places, the role of the human psyche, and the nature of divinity and the infinite. Corrington examines the difference between psyche and physis; the former formulates mythopoetic meaning out of the data of the phenomenal world and provides the basis for our understanding of political order. By way of consciousness, the psyche comprehends and organizes logos and thereby structures our understanding of reality, including what it means to be human.

The second essay concerning the recovery of the humanities originated as a lecture at Kansas State University in 1986. It builds on the ideas in the previous essay / lecture regarding the derailment of the humanities in light of the gradual loss of noetic homonoia or sense of like-mindedness among disparate cultures with similar understandings of symbolic order.

Corrington seeks to substantiate the arguments from the previous essay / lecture by consulting T. S. Eliot’s notion of order as experienced through literary texts. Corrington suggests that Eliot’s notion of order “exists initially in the psyche of the poet-critic who represents his experience of truth by way of the symbolism of simultaneous order; it exists secondarily in the collective psyches of those who are capable of reenacting Eliot’s experience theoretically, and who find themselves, as if in Platonic dialogue with the poet, bound to admit the truth of what he says about the order—even as his work continues and extends the order.” Applying Eliot’s notion of order to classical texts, Corrington demonstrates that symbolized experience has a temporal element whereas the psyche, existing independently of any one person, is timeless.

Corrington references the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (otherwise known as the Nazi Party), various Marxist-Leninist operations, the French Academy, and the Index Libororum of the Holy Office as examples of practices and institutions that attempted to break down the ideal order that is represented in the continuity of certain canonical texts. Corrington challenges Eliot’s apparent assumption that art and literature are the proper lenses for examining symbolic order. He considers what qualities of a work make it literary as opposed to philosophical—or something else entirely. His point is not to discredit Eliot but to suggest that Eliot’s notion of order in literature is nuanced and complex.

Corrington argues that what drives human culture is “the human psyche in search of itself in the multiplicity of its forms, dimensions, and possibilities—and the loving and fearing tension within that psyche toward the divine ground.” Corrington returns to the idea that studying symbolic orders in different times and places reveals the commonalities between disparate peoples and cultures: “Whether we probe the roots of high civilizations or purportedly ‘primitive’ cultures, the result is the same: the foundations of human order are invariant: The society in question either represents itself as mirroring the order of the cosmos, the society of the gods, or expresses itself as that existential ground upon which gods and men interact with one another, the business of men and gods inextricably fused.” Understood this way, the political order of any given society can be explained as a reflection of metaxy, that state between the human and the divine whereby humans attempt to organize themselves in keeping with their beliefs about the nature of the divine and its order.

The understanding of human place in the world in relation to the divine is, according to Corrington, the humanities. Corrington critiques Eliot’s notion of an ideal order, but credits Eliot for what Eliot’s theory discloses, to wit, the organizing possibility of symbols to convey experiential realities: “Eliot’s earlier critical expression of an ideal order is thus discovered to be an inadequate but evocative symbolism which has, even as a poem might, invited us to probe the experience symbolized and rectify, through analysis of the symbolisms, the precise character of the experience.” Corrington again calls for the recovery of the humanities, not for the sake of any divisive telos or ideological goal, but instead for the unifying potential of an experiential and symbolic understanding of human purpose over time and in disparate places.

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John William Corrington on the Academic Revolution

In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, Creative Writing, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, Western Philosophy, Writing on October 31, 2018 at 6:45 am

John William Corrington delivered “The Academic Revolution,” which is part memoir, as a lecture at Centenary College in 1969. In this talk, Corrington seeks to develop what he calls his “ontologies,” which he adopted in part while he was a student at Centenary.

Corrington suggests here that our lives are short and meaningless without an ontology and that our purposive acts ought to be guided by essential patterns of history.

Corrington’s conservatism and his belief in canonical greatness are apparent in his recommendation to “enter that vast communion of past, present, and future, of living, dead, and yet to be born that was recognized by the early church and called the communion of saints.” One’s sense of place and continuity, Corrington submits, is requisite to the production of great works of art.

Corrington suggests that academic revolution is paradoxically tied to tradition in that the new necessarily springs from the old. Corrington claims that the current academic revolution is rooted in the rejection of authority and the repudiation of materialism. He is concerned with the transitional ethic of the 1960s and the concomitant widespread questioning of the legitimacy of authority and institutions. He refers to this questioning as the New Politics.

Corrington praises the academic revolution and encourages universities to serve as a matrix for that revolution. He believes that universities study the old disciplines to reveal new ways of forming constructive communities. Championing the drift of the university toward more student-centered objectives, toward more bottom-up rather than top-down power structures on campus, Corrington embraces and celebrates the reforming spirit of his students. He believes this spirit is in fact conservative in that custom and tradition and the complex, organic nature of social development teach that reform is necessary to ensure future growth.

Corrington suggests that colleges and other institutions, to remain faithful to the past, must reform themselves; to be faithful to the past, in other words, colleges and other such institutions must rework and re-energize the past for present purposes.

“The Academic Revolution” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below:

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John William Corrington on “The Message” as “Art”

In American Literature, Arts & Letters, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Writing on October 24, 2018 at 6:45 am

“The Message as Art,” a short essay, is likely the written version of a lecture that John William Corrington delivered to the South-Central Modern Language Association in 1971. The title of that talk was “The Poetry of Rock & Roll.”

The “message” in art to which Corrington refers involves politics, or the role of “social consciousness” in works of poetry and fiction. Corrington suggests that, rather than generalize about the importation of politics to literature, one should examine each work on a case-by-case basis to determine whether it is art with a social theme or merely “a harangue disguised as art.”

Corrington is concerned with the distinction between art and propaganda; the latter, he suggests, is marked by cliché and the sort of troping that entails no clear political referent (i.e., no nameable, observable social examples) in the actual world. For this reason Corrington criticizes art that employs such general types as “Big Business, the German Army, the Atomic Bomb, Big Labor, Hollywood, Mom, jingoistic patriotism, etc.”

“The Message as Art” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below:

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John William Corrington on Intuition and Intellect

In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Essays, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Modernism, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, The South, Western Philosophy, Writing on October 17, 2018 at 6:45 am

In my edition of John William Corrington’s essays, I assembled Corrington’s unpublished notes and sections of his unpublished lectures from the early 1970s that he maintained in one document.  Because of the subject matter, I titled this section “Intuition-Intellect.”

This material demonstrates the shift in Corrington’s interests in poetry as a craft to more philosophical concerns that were influenced by poetry, or mythopoetics. His discussion of myth and his references to Eric Voegelin in these notes suggests that he had just begun to read Voegelin and to explore Gnosticism and myth criticism.

Corrington questions here the relationship between science and philosophy and hypothesizes about how the truths generated by science become mythologized to satisfy certain human desires. He proposes that science itself has a “mythic” character and claims that “the aftermath of every significant act of science is its mythologization.” Corrington speculates whether myth is inevitable because it fulfills something basic or instinctive in human nature.

Science amasses data for their predictive value, but asking what these data mean is the beginning of myth, which, properly understood, is another form of understanding and articulating truths about the world. However, myth can also, Corrington claims, have destructive implications at odds with truth. He warns about mismanaging myth, giving such examples as Nazism, Marxism, and free enterprise: ideological constructs that rely on abstract myth narratives to stamp out opposition.

Corrington critiques the scientism that has developed since the Enlightenment because he considers its emphasis on empiricism and rationalism to mask its role in formulating mythic patterns or archetypes for governing the phenomenal world, including the human social order. These patterns or archetypes, despite their mythic nature, are taken as authoritative and valid because they are conflated with or understood as scientific truth; in this manner they are assumed to be separate and apart from myth when in fact they constitute myth.  They are dangerous because they are presumed to be scientific truth subject to certain and definite application when in fact they represent mythopoetic urges to satisfy innate and instinctual human impulses.

Corrington transitions from this discussion of myth and science into a discussion of twentieth-century poetry and its “overintellectualization,” as evidenced by the implementation of supposedly scientific approaches to the study of poetry. Corrington considers the New Criticism to represent such a scientific approach to poetry.

The turn to reason and science, Corrington suggests, has destroyed the aesthetics of poetry just as it has destroyed human civilizations in the sociopolitical context. In both contexts there has been, he believes, a failure to realize the distinction between science and the mythologization of science, a failure that has led certain groups to mistake what is unreasonable and irrational for absolute reason and rationality, to believe, that is, that what is merely a pattern or archetype—a human construct—is something given and definite even apart from human knowledge of it. Those who fail to understand the distinction between science and the mythologization of science embrace a potentially destructive psychic system that mistakes science for its opposite. This essay shows that, as Corrington begins to transition away from the writing of poetry, he is also trying to integrate his interest in poetry with his growing interest in philosophy.

The exact date of this Corrington material is unknown; however, certain references suggest that Corrington wrote these notes in or around 1971. For example, he mentions a “new” album by the Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers, which came out in 1971. It is possible that part of this material comes from a lecture that Corrington gave to the South-Central Modern Language Association in 1968. That lecture was titled “Cassirer’s Curse, Keats’s Urn, and the Poem Before the Poem.” Some of the material may have come from the National Science Foundation Lecture that Corrington titled “Science and the Humanities” and delivered at Louisiana State University in 1966. Corrington began the essay with four discursive notes under the heading “Statements and Questions.” Because the ideas in these notes are more fully developed in the text proper, I have moved them to the end of the essay.

“Intuition-Intellect” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below:

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Who Was John William Corrington?

In America, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, Essays, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Poetry, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, The South, Writing on October 10, 2018 at 6:45 am

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Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 28, 1932, John William Corrington—or Bill, as his friends and family called him—claimed on his academic CV that he was born in Memphis, Tennessee.  Raised Catholic, he attended a Jesuit high school in Louisiana but was expelled for “having the wrong attitude.” The Jesuit influence would remain with him as he explored in his scholarly pursuits certain forms of Catholic mysticism as well as the teachings of the ancient Gnostics.

Bill loved the South and Southern literature and during his career authored or edited, or in some cases co-edited, twenty books of varying genres.  He earned a B.A. from Centenary College and M.A. in Renaissance literature from Rice University, where he met his wife, Joyce, whom he married on February 6, 1960. In September of that year, he and Joyce moved to Baton Rouge, where he became an instructor in the Department of English at Louisiana State University (LSU). At that time, LSU’s English department was known above all for The Southern Review (TSR), the brainchild of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, but also for such literary luminaries as Robert Heilman, who would become Bill’s friend.

In the early 1960s, Bill pushed for TSR to feature fiction and poetry and not just literary criticism. He butted heads with then-editors Donald E. Stanford and Lewis P. Simpson. A year after joining the LSU faculty, he published his first book of poetry, Where We Are. With only 18 poems and 225 first edition printings, the book hardly established his reputation as a Southern man of letters. But it gave his name instant recognition and inspired his confidence to complete his first novel, And Wait for the Night (1964).

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Bill and Joyce spent the 1963-64 academic year in Sussex, England, where Bill took his D.Phil. from the University of Sussex in 1965, writing his dissertation on James Joyce. In the summer of 1966, at a conference at Northwestern State College, Mel Bradford, a Southern conservative English professor, pulled Bill aside and told him that And Wait for the Night (1964) shared some of the themes and approaches of William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished.  Bill agreed, happily.

Of Bill and Miller Williams, Bill’s colleague at LSU, Jo LeCoeur, poet and literature professor, once stated, “Both men had run into a Northern bias against what was perceived as the culturally backward South.  While at LSU they fought back against this snub, editing two anthologies of Southern writing and lecturing on ‘The Dominance of Southern Writers.’  Controversial as a refutation of the anti-intellectual Southern stereotype, their joint lecture was so popular [that] the two took it on the road to area colleges.”

In 1966, Bill and Joyce moved to New Orleans, where the English Department at Loyola University, housed in a grand Victorian mansion on St. Charles Avenue, offered him a chairmanship. Joyce earned her M.S. in chemistry from LSU that same year. By this time, Bill had written four additional books of poetry, the last of which, Lines to the South and Other Poems (1965), benefited from Charles Bukowski’s friendship and influence. Bill’s poetry earned a few favorable reviews but not as much attention as his novels—And Wait for the Night (1964), The Upper Hand (1967), and The Bombardier (1970). Writing in The Massachusetts Review, Beat poet and critic Josephine Miles approvingly noted two of Bill’s poems from Lines, “Lucifer Means Light” and “Algerien Reveur,” alongside poetry by James Dickey. Dickey himself admired Bill’s writing, saying, “A more forthright, bold, adventurous writer than John William Corrington would be very hard to find.”

Joyce earned her PhD in chemistry from Tulane in 1968.  Her thesis, which she wrote under the direction of L. C. Cusachs, was titled, “Effects of Neighboring Atoms in Molecular Orbital Theory.” She began teaching chemistry at Xavier University; her knowledge of the hard sciences brought about engaging conservations, between her and Bill, about the New Physics. “Even though Bill only passed high school algebra,” Joyce would later say, “his grounding in Platonic idealism made him more capable of understanding the implications of quantum theory than many with more adequate educations.”

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Bill became increasingly disenchanted with what he perceived to be radical campus politics, so he entered law school at Tulane University, graduating in 1975 and, with Joyce, coauthoring the screenplay for Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) while he was still a law student. By the time he graduated from law school, he had penned three novels, a short story collection, two editions (anthologies), and four books of poetry. But his writings earned him little money despite their sales figures.

Bill joined the law firm of Plotkin & Bradley, a small personal injury practice in New Orleans, and continued to publish in such journals as The Sewanee Review and The Southern Review, and in such conservative periodicals as The Intercollegiate Review and Modern Age.  His stories took on a legal bent, peopled as they were with judges and attorneys. But neither law nor legal fiction brought him the fame or fortune he desired.

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So he turned to screenplays—and, at last, earned the profits he sought. Viewers of the recent film I am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith, might be surprised to learn that Bill and Joyce wrote the screenplay for the earlier version, Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston.  And viewers of the recent Battle for the Planet of the Apes films, the latest of which is currently in theaters, might be surprised to learn that Bill co-wrote the film’s original screenplay. All told, Bill and Joyce wrote five screenplays and one television movie together. Bill collaborated with Joyce on various television soap operas as well, among them Search for Tomorrow, Another World, Texas, Capitol, One Life to Live, Superior Court, and General Hospital.  These ventures gained the favor of Hollywood stars, and Bill and Joyce eventually moved to Malibu.

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By the mid-70s, Bill, who preferred deep learning and philosophy to the popular writing that was earning him a comfortable living, had become fascinated by Eric Voegelin. A German historian, philosopher, and émigré who had fled the Third Reich, Voegelin taught in LSU’s history department and lectured for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he was a Salvatori Fellow. Voegelin’s philosophy inspired Bill and gave Bill a research focus and writing subject for the hours when he was not writing for film or television. In fact, Voegelin made such a lasting impression that, at the time of Bill’s death, Bill was working on an edition of Voegelin’s The Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings. (After Bill’s death, two men—Robert Anthony Pascal and James Lee Babin—finished what Bill had begun. The completed edition appeared in 1991.)

Bill constantly molded and remolded his image, embracing Southern signifiers while altering their various expressions.  His early photos suggest a pensive, put-together gentleman wearing ties and sport coats and smoking pipes.  Later photos depict a rugged man clad in western wear. Still later photos conjure up the likes of Roy Orbison, what with Bill’s greased hair, cigarettes, and dark sunglasses.

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Whatever his looks, Bill was a stark, provocative, and profoundly sensitive writer. His impressive oeuvre has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves. There are no doubt many aspects of Bill’s life and literature left to be discovered.  As Bill’s friend William Mills put it, “I believe there is a critique of modernity throughout [Bill’s] writing that will continue to deserve serious attentiveness and response.”

On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1988, Bill suffered a heart attack and died. He was 56. His last words were, “it’s all right.” An introduction to his life’s work is both timely and necessary; this proposed manuscript will fill a gap in scholarship in addition to surveying the works of a man who was so important to the literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, this manuscript will make a scholarly contribution even as it serves as a basic introduction to Corrington’s writing and career.

This manuscript, moreover, will have the added benefit of being the first book-length exposition of Corrington’s oeuvre and will place his fiction and poetry into historical context. The manuscript will consist of approximately 58,000 to 60,000 words, including bibliography and front matter. It will include both primary and secondary bibliographies. More detailed information about the specific plan of the book may be found below. Here, in conclusion, is a list of Corrington’s most notable works:

 

Where We Are (Poetry), The Charioteer Press, Washington,

  1. C., 1962. Hardback and paperback.

 

The Anatomy of Love and Other Poems (Poetry), Roman Books,

Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 1964.  Hardback and paperback.

 

Mr. Clean and Other Poems (Poetry), Amber House Press, San

Francisco, California, 1964.

 

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And Wait for the Night (Novel),

  1. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1964;

Anthony Blond, Ltd., London, 1964;

Pocket Books, Inc., New York, N. Y., 1965;

Panther Books, Ltd., London, 1967.

 

Lines to the South and Other Poems (Poetry), Louisiana State

University Press, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1965.

 

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Southern Writing in the Sixties: Fiction (Anthology), ed.

with Miller Williams, Louisiana State University Press,

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1966. Hardback and paperback.

 

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Southern Writing in the Sixties: Poetry (Anthology), ed.

with Miller Williams, Louisiana State University Press,

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1967. Hardback and paperback.

 

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The Upper Hand (Novel),

  1. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1967;

Anthony Blond, Ltd., London, 1968;

Berkeley Books, New York, N. Y., 1968;

Panther Books, London, 1969.

 

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The Lonesome Traveler and Other Stories (Short Fiction),

  1. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1968.

 

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The Bombardier (Novel),

  1. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1970;

Lancer Books, New York, N. Y., 1972.

 

The Actes and Monuments (Short Fiction), University of

Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1978. Hardback and paperback.

 

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The Southern Reporter Stories (Short Fiction),

Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge,

Louisiana, 1981.

 

 

Shad Sentell (Novel),

Congdon & Weed, Inc., New York, N. Y., 1984;

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(Shad) Macmillan, London, 1984;

(Shad) Grafton Books, London, 1986.

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So Small a Carnival, (Novel, with Joyce H. Corrington),

Viking/Penguin, New York, 1986;

Ballantine Books, New York, 1987;

(Karneval med doden) Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck

A/S, Kobenhavn, Denmark, 1988;

Hayakawa Publishing, Inc, Japan, 1988;

(New Orleans Carneval) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munchen,

Germany, 1988;

(Carnaval de Sangue) Editora Best Seller, Sao Paulo,

Brazil, 1988;

Mysterious Press, London, UK, 1989;

(Carnaval de Sangue) Editora Nova Cultural Ltda., Sao

Paulo, Brazil, 1990.

 

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A Project Named Desire, (Novel, with Joyce H. Corrington),

Viking/Penguin, New York, 1987;

(Das Desire-Projekt) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munchen,

Germany, 1987;

 

Ballantine Books, New York, 1988;

(Dannys sidste sang) Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck,

Kobenhavn, Denmark, 1988;

Hayakawa Publishing, Inc., Japan, 1988;

(Una Canzone Per Morire) Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

S.p.A., Milano, Italy;

(Um Projecto Chamado Desejo) Editora Nova Cultural

Ltda., Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1990;

(Um Projecto Chamado Desejo) Circulo do Livro, Sao

Paulo, Brazil, 1990;

(Um Projecto Chamado Desejo) Editora Best Seller, Sao

Paulo, Brazil, 1990.

 

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A Civil Death, (Novel, with Joyce H. Corrington),

Viking/Penguin, New York, 1987;

(Begrabnis Erster Klasse) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag,

Munchen, Germany, 1988;

Ballantine Books, New York, 1989;

Hayakawa Publishing, Inc., Japan, 1989;

(Finche Odio Ci Separi) Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

S.p.A., Milano, Italy, 1989.

 

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All My Trials, (2 Short Novels, “Decoration Day” and “The

Risi’s Wife”), University of Arkansas Press,

Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1987. Hardback and paperback.

 

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The White Zone, (Novel with Joyce Corrington),

Viking/Penguin, New York, 1990.

 

 

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The Collected Stories of John William Corrington, ed. by

Joyce Corrington, University of Missouri Press,

Columbia, Missouri, 1990.

 

The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 27, The Nature

    of the Law, and Related Legal Writings, ed. with Robert

Anthony Pascal, James Lee Babin, Louisiana State

University Press, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1991.

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