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Examines the impact of modernism on O'Connor's life and art as seen in her themes and literary techniques; offers 25 essays...
Paulson exmines the influence of modernism on Flannery O'Connor; examining "O'Connor's 'modern consciousness' to [help] explain why her work at first glance seems 'different' and to suggest a more balanced approach than the strictly theological one that dominates most criticism on O'Connor today."

The book is divided into three parts.

Part 1, "The Short Fiction: A Critical Analysis," outlines the variety of themes and literary techniques O'Connor displayed in her short fiction. Paulson identifies a predominant character type -- "Death-Haunted Questers" -- and, four recurring types of conflict in her stories: Male/Female, Class, Racial, and Good/Evil.

Part 2, "The Writer: Selected Comments by O'Connor, Her Friends, Her Mentors, Her Editors, and Her Critics," is intended to provide readers with "a selection of O'Connor's own comments on her art, her reader, and her community." Selections are included to illustrate "interesting interrelationships" of authorial commentary. Considers her Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann as the most important excerpt in this section.

Part 3, "The Critics," includes reprints and excerpts of 25 critical essays, a chronology of O'Connor's life, honors and work, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

States that the 25 essays included are intended, not only for readers "familiar with The Complete Stories but [also for those] just beginning a study of the criticism." Advises that the selections were chosen "to reconcile some of the differences in the critical canon" as well as to provide "thoughtful interpretations representing diverse judgments about O'Connor's short fiction generally."

The selections include:

Quinn, Sister M. Bernetta. "Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Writer": (154-56).

Levy, Maurice. "Catholic Writing and Universal Themes of Suffering": (157-59).

Curley, Dan. "Flannery O'Connor and Moral Relativism": (159-61).

Fitzgerald, Robert. "Flannery O'Connor and the Modern Consciousness": (161-64).

Eggenschwiler, David. "Wholeness, Incompleteness, and Estrangement: Flannery O'Connor and Christian Humanism": (164-68).

Myers, David A. "Fragmentation and Angst in 'The Displaced Person'": (169-70).

Le Clezio, J.M.G., "The Parent's Fear of Death in Modern Civilization": (170-72).

Heller, Arno. "The Developing Self in the Modern World": (172-73).

Klug, M.A. "Flannery O'Connor and the Artist" (173-75).

Gresset, Michel. "Flannery O'Connor and the South" (176-77). Trans. C. Frederick Farrell, Jr. and Edith R. Farrell.

Gordon, Sarah. "Flannery O'Connor and Realism" (177-80).

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. "Flannery O'Connor and Southern Fiction" (180-82).

Driskell, Leon V. and Joan T. Brittain. "Flannery O'Connor and the Bible" (182-84).

Bleikasten, Andre. "Flannery O'Connor, Freud, and Lacan" (185-88).

Jones, Bartlett C. "Flannery O'Connor and Depth Psychology" (188-90).

[Kahane], Claire Katz. "Flannery O'Connor's Sadistic Wit." (191-95).

Westling, Louise. "Feminine Identity." (195-98).

Browning, Preston M. "O'Connor's Clinical Understanding of Neurosis." (199-210).

Morton, Mary L. "O'Connor and Jung." (201-03).

Asals, Frederick. "The Terrifying, the Comic, and the Melodramatic." (204-07).

Currie, Sheldon. "Flannery O'Connor's Comic Imagery." (207-09).

Kessler, Edward. "Flannery O'Connor's Poetic Imagery." (209-13).

Richard, Claude. "Flannery O'Connor and Narratology." (213-18).

Drake, Robert. "Flannery O'Connor's Compassion." (218-19).

Walters, Dorothy. "The Lack of Beauty in Flannery O'Connor's Work." (220-23).


R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University
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This book begins with a brief quotation form the writings of a spiritual guide. You will find a short re-flection designed to put a Lenten spin on the words you just read, a perspective rooted in the realities of our own time and place and the season of Lent. ... Read more

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good literature that's NOT boring
"In The Piano Tuner, Peter Meinke writes of the foreignness that awaits us when we go abroad and when we answer our own front door to admit a stranger, that confronts us in unfamiliar cities and villages and in the equally disquieting surroundings of our memories and regrets.

Often in these stories, what seems a safe, comfortable environment turns suddenly threatening. In the title story, a writer's quiet existence amid his antiques and books is dismantled, piece by piece, by a demonic, beer-bellied piano tuner. In "The Ponoes," a man recalls how, as a young boy living in Brooklyn during World War II, he became a collaborationist in the brutal pranks of two Irish bullies. In "The Twisted River," the sedate collegiality of a Polish university is disrupted when an American on a Fulbright grant attempts to blackmail two faculty members. And in "The Bracelet," a young anthropology student doing field work in Africa finds herself drawn further and further into the role of a priestess of Oshun, into a life dictated by the configuration of cowry shells cast upon the floor.

Meinke writes of a world where our control over our lives seldom exists across a border, and often extends no further than our fingertips. Attempts to bridge two cultures, two lives are sometimes successful, as when an actor finds love in the arms of a tough-talking barmaid, but more usually lead to disillusionment, as when a hard-drinking salesman's career is shattered after he is drunk under the table one night by a Polish engineer, or when an English father struggles to find common ground with his American son. Riveting, almost terrifying, the stories in The Piano Tuner tell of decent men and women caught in events that they could never have predicted, would never have chosen."UGA PRess ... Read more

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Discusses themes and characters in O'Connor's stories and novels, focusing on her artistic concern with "the realm of the Holy"
McFarland discusses Flannery O'Connor's artistic concern with "how the realm of the Holy interpenetrates this world and affects it." Comments that her use of the grotesque serves as "an offshoot of the fictional form that Hawthorne designated as 'romance' to distinguish it from the traditional novel." Remarks that O'Connor's use evokes "a world empty of meaning" and expresses "the incommensurability between the divine and the human."

Discusses the style, techniques, themes, characters, and mystery found in O'Connor's stories in A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Offers an explication of the title story which focuses on how she reveals "the hollowness of the protagonist's conventional understanding of order, of destroying the conventional order," and how she suggests "the existence of a profound but appallingly demanding order beneath it." Offers less detailed analyses of the other stories in the collection.

Sees the stories in O'Connor's second collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, as reflecting her interest in Teilhard de Chardin's hypothesis that "evolution, far from stopping with the emergence of homo sapiens, continues to progress toward higher levels of consciousness." Notes that her characters in these stories "typically resist this kind of rising and the spiritual convergence with others that accompanies it."

Finds that while her novel, Wise Blood, is "strong and strikingly original," it is also a bizarre novel with a "starkness of style and flatness of characterization" that prevent it from being easily accessible. Outlines the novel's plot and discusses how "despite his protestations of disbelief in Jesus, Haze is nevertheless obsessed with him." Discusses how his "condition" of not having a home and his fierce commitment "to the belief that he has no soul" affect his actions throughout the novel. Includes a discussion of the role of vision in her novel, and how the ending "reflects Haze's progress from alienation, isolation, and imprisonment," to a final stage of union -- through death -- with God.

Outlines the plot of The Violent Bear It Away and explores the motivation for Tarwater's actions. Contrasts his efforts to transform himself "completely into a mechanical man" in the beginning and middle of the novel with the focused and determined prophet he has become by the end.

Closes with a comparison of the two novels, and concludes that both embody "a paradox in that their theological content is offset by a tone that begins in comedy and becomes increasingly dark, violent, and horrifying."

Suggests in closing that O'Connor viewed herself "as a prophet," with her art serving as the medium for her "prophetic message."

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University
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'Lord, I'm glad I'm a hermit novelist', Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend in 1957. Sequestered by ill health, O'Connor spent the last thirteen years of her life on the family farm in rural Georgia, which she claimed was accessible 'only by bus or buzzard'. During this productive, solitary time she became increasingly fascinated by fourth-century Christians who retreated to the desert for spiritual replenishment. In "Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist", Richard Giannone explores O'Connor's identification with these early Christian monastics, a bond that stemmed from her faith as well as her own isolation and physical suffering from lupus, and the ways in which their strange, still voices illuminate her fiction.Distinguishing among various desert calls summoning O'Connor's protagonists to solitude and renunciation, Giannone shows how these characters live out a radical simplicity of ascetic discipline as a means of grappling with their demons and drawing closer to God.Combining discussion of her fiction with biographical detail and excerpts from the writings of the early Christians, Giannone reveals how O'Connor's treatment of the desert brings self-denial and self-scrutiny to bear on the urgencies of modern American life. Through the insights of the ancient monastics, "Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist" not only clarifies the bizarre demonology that has long perplexed O'Connor's readers but also reveals in her fiction an attention to the qualities of inner life and a prescient concern for the rampant evil and dissensions of the outside world. ... Read more

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Provides the first published, comprehensive descriptive bibliography for Flannery O'Connor scholars...
Golden's section of this two-author work provides an indexed, comprehensive, chronological descriptive bibliography -- excluding transient mentions and materials contained in standard reference sources -- of reviews, articles, books and other secondary materials published between 1952 and 1976 related to Flannery O'Connor.

Acknowledges that the volume's descriptive annotations are not designed to be evaluative, nor do they attempt to judge the the quality of an author's viewpoint. Instead, the authors have produced -- Golden for O'Connor and Sullivan for Caroline Gordon -- a convenient guide "useful for discovering the various interpretations" of O'Connor's works and "for tracing the growth and changing nature of her literary reputation."

The O'Connor section includes some foreign language materials and a checklist of Ph.D. dissertations for the period 1961-1975.

Golden completed his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester where he completed his dissertation in 1972 titled, "Violence and Art in Postwar American Literature: A Study of O'Connor, Kosinski, Hawkes and Pynchon."

A comparison of the O'Connor contents of this book with that of a previous bibliographic effort by Georgia Anne Newman (her master's thesis at Florida State University in 1970, titled: "Flannery O'Connor: Annotated Bibliography of Seconary Sources,") suggests that Golden may have used her work as a foundation.

The follow-up volume to Golden's work is that of this author, (R. Neil Scott), "Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism," Milledgeville, GA: Timberlane Books, 2002, designated by CHOICE as an "Outstanding Academic Title" for 2002. ... Read more

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A ground-breaking study of Flannery O'Connor and her place in American culture, A Wreck on the Road to Damascus weaves together high art and popular culture in a way that makes literary criticism exciting. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Brian Abel Ragen shows not just the depth of O'Connor's religious vision, but also the ferocity of her attack on the literary tradition that at once denied original sin—her favorite doctrine—and shoved women to the margins of American culture. His work will change the way readers think about Flannery O'Connor, automobiles, original sin, and American culture. ... Read more

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Discusses O'Connor's use of the automobile and other aspects of popular culture to contrast redemption and materialistic freedom
Ragen explores how Flannery O'Connor uses the automobile and other elements of popular culture "to embody the idea of perfect freedom." Sees her use "as an emblem for the philosophies" that celebrate this freedom, and observes her focus on "the figure of the solitary man, who is burdened by no past, forms no ties in the present, and is always able to create himself anew and assume a fresh identity."

Outlines how her treatment shows that an individual must choose between the illusory promise of perfect freedom or the real offer of redemption. And, contends that the effectiveness of O'Connor's fiction lies in how she fuses elements from popular culture with biblical stories and images of violence. Suggests that she developed a theory of fiction based upon the idea that "a work can convey many meanings, including the most spiritual, by accurately describing the physical world."

Discusses how essential Christian doctrines, such as Original Sin, salvation and the Incarnation, serve as a foundation for O'Connor's work. Offers readings of "Parker's Back," "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," and a lengthy, detailed explication of her novel, Wise Blood. Contends that in each, the main character's "reaction to the awful offer of grace is tightly bound up with [her] exploration of Christian mysteries and her attack on recent intellectual movements."

Explores O'Connor's use of distortion "to write on what she called the anagogical level," and the significance of "an action or a gesture" to reveal the spiritual meaning of a story.

Readers may also want to track down and read Ragen's Ph.D. dissertation, "The Motions of Grace: Flannery O'Connor's Typology" completed in 1987 at Princeton University.

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University

No wrecks here!
Ragen's study, along with works such as Jon Lance Bacon's *Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture*, locates the Georgia author within broad patterns of American cultural history. Ragen grants O'Connor's interpretation of her work as an incarnational art. Through a series of clever close reads of *Wise Blood* and short stories such as "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," Ragen shows how O'Connor inscribes her religious meanings on one of postwar America's defining technologies: the car. Ragen looks to O'Connor's personal library, letters, and reading habits to locate her in a mid-century tradition of Catholic pop culture criticism typified by Marshall McLuhan, whose book *The Mechanical Bride* O'Connor much admired.Writing from the perspective of American Studies, Ragen argues that O'Connor focuses on cars to critique the myth of the American Adam, a pervasive American myth typified by those self-made men that populate not only American literature but also the advertisements and products of American consumer culture as well.

With its combination of original research and detailed critical surveys (and very readable prose), Ragen's book will interest not only O'Connor scholars but also students seeking a good review of the field of American Studies in general. You do not need to be an academic to enjoy Ragen's book either; if you are an O'Connor fan, reading Ragen's study will broaden your mind and give you a new appreciation of O'Connor's fiction. This one-of-a-kind study is highly Recommended for all of O'Connor's admirers.

Doug Davis
Gordon College

I don't know....
I ordered this book from Amazon two months ago and have yet to receive it. ... Read more

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"On the subject of the feminist business": Re-Reading Flannery O'Connor is a groundbreaking collection of critical essays that responds to mainstream feminist theory in approaching O'Connor's fiction. These innovative readings provide a fresh reappraisal of O'Connor's work, revealing how she defies the patriarchal Southern culture in which she lived with brilliantly subversive depictions of the women who inhabited her world ... Read more

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In the spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas, the writings of Flannery O’Connor’s concern for place can best be seen in the immediacies of things and persons. It is in relation to St. Thomas’ teaching, then, that O’Connor becomes comfortable in her "place," Andalusia, that small farm just outside the small town of Milledgeville in middle Georgia. The abiding relationship between place—Andalusia or elsewhere—and a person comes out of human nature itself, evidenced in a person’s experiences of things in this place at this time.

With that as background, this detailed analysis of O’Connor’s works lays to rest the author’s own self-deprecating description of herself as a "hillbilly" Thomist. Instead we see in O’Connor’s writing a highly sophisticated mind, an inconvenience to the many critics who dismiss her as anti-intellectual.

The book is published as a set of two volumes. Replacement volumes can be obtained individually under ISBN 07864-26268 (for Volume 1) and ISBN 0786426276 (for Volume 2). ... Read more

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Tony Ardizzone writes of the moments in our lives that shine, that burn in thedim expanse of memory with the intensity and vivid light of the evening news.Themen and women in these stories tend to arrange their days, order their pasts, plantheir futures in the light of such moments, finding epiphanies in the glowing memoryof a father's laugh or a mother's repeated story, in a broken date or a rained-outball game.
Set mostly in Chicago's blue-collar neighborhoods, these stories focus onsubjects that concern us all: disease and death, vandalism and sacrilege, rape andinfidelity, lost love.In "My Mother's Stories" a son resolves his mounting griefover his mother's imminent death by recalling the stories she has told all her life."My Father's Laugh"tells of a young man teetering on the brink of adulthood, andfinally finding hope and reassurance from the remembered sound of his bus-driverfather's laugh, from remembered phrases such as "Move away from the window, lady,can't you see I'm driving" and "If you ain't got a quarter or a token there,grandma, you and your purse can get off at the next stop."
The husband and wife in the title story look at their pasts -- his as an activistin the sixties and hers as a believer in reincarnation and the tarot -- in light ofthe news stories they watch on television each evening, and question whether theyshould bring a child into the world.And in "The Walk-On," a bartender and formervarsity pitcher for the University of Illinois Fighting Illini finds the actualevents of the most cataclysmic day in his past unequal to their impact on his lifeand so rewrites them in his mind, adding an ill-placed banana peel, a fallingmeteor, and a careening truck in order to create a more fitting climax and finallyto leave those memories behind him.
Searching their pasts for clues to the present, searching the horizons of theirdays for love, the characters in The Evening News seek, and sometimes find,redemption in a world of uncertainty and brightly burning emotions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Reviews O'Connor's use of the archetypal trickster to contrast modern material-rationalist views of reality with myth/folklore
Examines the structural elements and narrative methods Flannery O'Connor employs "to create her fictional landscape." Focuses on her use of the archetypal trickster as "a likely guide through [her] landscape and interpreter of her narrative secret."

Discusses the characteristics, importance, and utility for her "artistic and religious purposes" of the trickster figure. Suggests that these figures not only link her stories "with diverse literatures but also open a discourse between twentieth-century material-rationalist interpretations of reality and ancient folklore and myth."

Focuses on five "narrative devices through which O'Connor shapes the structures of stories" in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, including, her use of: backwoods speech juxtaposed to biblical allusions; incantation; doubled characters who embody the shadows and contradictions of innocence and experience; circular narrative structures; and, her use of "ambiguous figures who move from the fringes to the center of action" to transform characters.

Discusses how she uses "techniques of indirection" to create tension. Then, explores: the unpredictable and uneven role of her narrators and the challenges they pose for critics; "how the shifting narrative voice assists "the mediations of the trickster"; her use of "as if"; and, use of irony, "which makes it possible to hold apparently contradictory perceptions simultaneously."

Juxtaposes Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away to review the variety of literary devices shes uses to animate the structure of her fiction, and reviews "the principle of analogy" to explore "how the very structures of her novels are animated by her metaphysical views of the Incarnation."

Johansen completed a Ph.D. dissertation with this same title at Drew University in 1983.

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University
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