Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies: The Limits of Inference
Carol Shloss
Louisiana State University Press (January 16, 2012)
In Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies, Carol Shloss moves from biographical, thematic, and theological approaches and instead focuses her criticism on the successes and failures of O'Connor as a rhetorician.
This valuable study of O'Connor's style uses reader-response theory to dissect the author's use of hyperbole, distortion, allusion, analogy, the dramatization of extreme religious experience, the manipulation of judgment through narrative voice, and direct address to the reader.
Shloss aims to return Flannery O'Connor to her readers on fathomable terms, to offer a rhetorical, rather than theological, perspective from which to understand the country preachers, square-jawed farm wives, wise rubes, foolish intellectuals, huckster Bible salesmen, killers, and other ''good country people'' who populate O'Connor's fiction.
(Information from amazon.com.)
Louisiana State University Press (January 16, 2012)
In Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies, Carol Shloss moves from biographical, thematic, and theological approaches and instead focuses her criticism on the successes and failures of O'Connor as a rhetorician.
This valuable study of O'Connor's style uses reader-response theory to dissect the author's use of hyperbole, distortion, allusion, analogy, the dramatization of extreme religious experience, the manipulation of judgment through narrative voice, and direct address to the reader.
Shloss aims to return Flannery O'Connor to her readers on fathomable terms, to offer a rhetorical, rather than theological, perspective from which to understand the country preachers, square-jawed farm wives, wise rubes, foolish intellectuals, huckster Bible salesmen, killers, and other ''good country people'' who populate O'Connor's fiction.
(Information from amazon.com.)
Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons
Kelly Gerald (editor), Barry Moser (foreword)
Fantagraphics Books (January 10, 2012)
Before she became a literary legend, she wanted to be a cartoonist.
Flannery O’Connor was among the greatest American writers of the second half of the 20th century; she was a writer in the Southern tradition of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers, who wrote such classic novels and short stories as Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” She is perhaps as well known for her tantalizing brand of Southern Gothic humor as she is for her Catholicism. That these tendencies should be so happily married in her fiction is no longer a surprise. The real surprise is learning that this much beloved icon of American literature did not set out to be a fiction writer, but a cartoonist. This seems to be the last well-kept secret of her creative life.
Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, the first book devoted to the author’s work in the visual arts, emphasizes O’Connor’s most prolific period as a cartoonist, drawing for her high school and college publications in the early 1940s. While many of these images lampoon student life and the impact of World War II on the home front, something much more is happening. Her cartoons are a creative threshing floor for experimenting and trying out techniques that are deployed later with such great success in her fiction.
O’Connor learns how to set up and carry a joke visually, how to write a good one-liner and set it off against a background of complex visual narration. She develops and asserts her taste for a stock set of character types, attitudes, situations, exaggerations, and grotesques, and she learns how to present them not to distort the truth, but to expose her vision of it.
She worked in both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, and her rough-hewn technique combined with her acidic observations to form a visual precursor to her prose. Fantagraphics is honored to bring the early cartoons of this American literary treasure to a 21st century readership.
For an audience resistant to your views, O’Connor once wrote, “draw large and startling figures.” In her fiction, as in her cartoons, these shocks to the system never come without a laugh. 120 pages of full-color comics
(Information from amazon.com.)
Fantagraphics Books (January 10, 2012)
Before she became a literary legend, she wanted to be a cartoonist.
Flannery O’Connor was among the greatest American writers of the second half of the 20th century; she was a writer in the Southern tradition of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers, who wrote such classic novels and short stories as Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” She is perhaps as well known for her tantalizing brand of Southern Gothic humor as she is for her Catholicism. That these tendencies should be so happily married in her fiction is no longer a surprise. The real surprise is learning that this much beloved icon of American literature did not set out to be a fiction writer, but a cartoonist. This seems to be the last well-kept secret of her creative life.
Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, the first book devoted to the author’s work in the visual arts, emphasizes O’Connor’s most prolific period as a cartoonist, drawing for her high school and college publications in the early 1940s. While many of these images lampoon student life and the impact of World War II on the home front, something much more is happening. Her cartoons are a creative threshing floor for experimenting and trying out techniques that are deployed later with such great success in her fiction.
O’Connor learns how to set up and carry a joke visually, how to write a good one-liner and set it off against a background of complex visual narration. She develops and asserts her taste for a stock set of character types, attitudes, situations, exaggerations, and grotesques, and she learns how to present them not to distort the truth, but to expose her vision of it.
She worked in both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, and her rough-hewn technique combined with her acidic observations to form a visual precursor to her prose. Fantagraphics is honored to bring the early cartoons of this American literary treasure to a 21st century readership.
For an audience resistant to your views, O’Connor once wrote, “draw large and startling figures.” In her fiction, as in her cartoons, these shocks to the system never come without a laugh. 120 pages of full-color comics
(Information from amazon.com.)
“Between the House and the Chicken Yard”: The Masks of Flannery O’Connor
Jolly Kay Sharp
Mercer University Press (October 30, 2011)
Recognizing personal tendencies and developing literary talents enabled Mary Flannery O’Connor to don multiple masks, concealing or revealing segments of herself as she desired. With no memoirs or lengthy autobiographies, O’Connor’s published works, letters, and manuscripts, along with previously unpublished letters, are examined to determine how O’Connor defined herself, not just how scholars interpret her life and works. In fact, the plethora of criticism is in danger of obscuring the most important authority: O’Connor herself. Carl Jung claimed that adopted personas allow people ways to conform to society acceptably. While O’Connor’s personal and social masks were affected by her Southern and Catholic roots, her vivid imagination and artistry fashioned her literary masks, allowing her to explore life’s grotesqueness. Some of O’Connor’s literary characters shelter self-defining features of her own personality and purpose. O’Connor’s masks serve as metaphorical embodiments of her veiled autobiography, illuminating key components of her sense of self and of her literary power. Sharp’s exploration of these society-obligatory and self-imposed masks identifies O’Connor’s goals, struggles, and successes; her critical insight into her own literature; her reaction and responses to family, friends, and acquaintances; and, ultimately, her own success and growth.
(Information from mupress.org.)
Mercer University Press (October 30, 2011)
Recognizing personal tendencies and developing literary talents enabled Mary Flannery O’Connor to don multiple masks, concealing or revealing segments of herself as she desired. With no memoirs or lengthy autobiographies, O’Connor’s published works, letters, and manuscripts, along with previously unpublished letters, are examined to determine how O’Connor defined herself, not just how scholars interpret her life and works. In fact, the plethora of criticism is in danger of obscuring the most important authority: O’Connor herself. Carl Jung claimed that adopted personas allow people ways to conform to society acceptably. While O’Connor’s personal and social masks were affected by her Southern and Catholic roots, her vivid imagination and artistry fashioned her literary masks, allowing her to explore life’s grotesqueness. Some of O’Connor’s literary characters shelter self-defining features of her own personality and purpose. O’Connor’s masks serve as metaphorical embodiments of her veiled autobiography, illuminating key components of her sense of self and of her literary power. Sharp’s exploration of these society-obligatory and self-imposed masks identifies O’Connor’s goals, struggles, and successes; her critical insight into her own literature; her reaction and responses to family, friends, and acquaintances; and, ultimately, her own success and growth.
(Information from mupress.org.)
Flannery O'Connor: Critical Insights
Charles E. May (editor)
Salem Press (September 15, 2011)
This volume is an effort to introduce O'Connor to a new generation of readers by including previously published essays that clarify her religious ideas, her narrative technique, her use of humor, and the regional and social context of her fiction.
The fiction of Flannery O'Connor has always posed unique challenges to modern readers. Her narrative style is symbolically unrealistic, her characters confront complex religious trials beyond their understanding, and her themes are often dependent on paradoxical concepts of Christian theology. O'Connor knew from the beginning of her career that both her method and her message would be bewildering to many readers.
Critics have responded to the challenge of O'Connor in staggering numbers. This includes a summary of such contemporary critical approaches to her work as postmodern critical theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
This volume is an effort to introduce O'Connor to a new generation of readers by including twelve previously published essays that clarify her religious ideas, her narrative technique, her use of humor, and the regional and social context of her fiction, and five original essays commissioned especially for this volume that make significant new contributions to the understanding and appreciation of her work.
At the heart of her writing is the central articulation of her subject—"the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil"—and explains why she felt she had to use shock and awe to make this vision apparent to her readers.
"A Good Man is Hard to Find," is discussed from a Catholic point of view in order to make clear exactly what constitutes the "duel" between the Misfit and the Grandmother at the conclusion of the story.
O'Connor's second most famous story, "Good Country People," is discussed to clarify her objections to rationalism. The essay on the story suggests that O'Connor's conviction that this story would not rouse the religious reader but rather the rationalists means that the story is central to understanding her quarrel with rationalism and her warnings against the dangers of nihilism.
For many readers, one of the most puzzling of O'Connor techniques is her humor, which is often thought to be inappropriate, or at least incompatible, with her religious ideas and the violence in her stories. An article argues that Henri Bergson's theories of humor help us understand how the three elements of violence, religion, and humor blend so effectively in O'Connor's fiction by showing how laughter serves a corrective social function.
Of course, some knowledge of the social context in which she wrote is also essential to fully appreciate and understand her fiction. O'Connor's life as a Catholic intellectual in Southern Bible Belt Protestantism makes it necessary to be familiar with the well defined color lines and class lines of O'Connor's childhood, as well as the transformations that took place in the South during her adulthood.
Other essays examine the role of female characters, social reality, domestic relations, romance, and symbolism. There is also discussion of her choice and use of the short story form.
Flannery O'Connor's career as a writer lasted only twelve years. However, this small corpus is as distinctive a body of work as any in modern writing. It is work that demands our full attention but eludes our full understanding.
Each essay is 5,000 words long, and all essays provide works cited and endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendices offer a section of useful reference resources:
A chronology of the author's life
A complete list of the author's works and their original dates of publication
A general bibliography
A detailed paragraph on the volume's editor
Notes on the individual chapter authors
A subject index
(Information from Salem Press.)
Salem Press (September 15, 2011)
This volume is an effort to introduce O'Connor to a new generation of readers by including previously published essays that clarify her religious ideas, her narrative technique, her use of humor, and the regional and social context of her fiction.
The fiction of Flannery O'Connor has always posed unique challenges to modern readers. Her narrative style is symbolically unrealistic, her characters confront complex religious trials beyond their understanding, and her themes are often dependent on paradoxical concepts of Christian theology. O'Connor knew from the beginning of her career that both her method and her message would be bewildering to many readers.
Critics have responded to the challenge of O'Connor in staggering numbers. This includes a summary of such contemporary critical approaches to her work as postmodern critical theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
This volume is an effort to introduce O'Connor to a new generation of readers by including twelve previously published essays that clarify her religious ideas, her narrative technique, her use of humor, and the regional and social context of her fiction, and five original essays commissioned especially for this volume that make significant new contributions to the understanding and appreciation of her work.
At the heart of her writing is the central articulation of her subject—"the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil"—and explains why she felt she had to use shock and awe to make this vision apparent to her readers.
"A Good Man is Hard to Find," is discussed from a Catholic point of view in order to make clear exactly what constitutes the "duel" between the Misfit and the Grandmother at the conclusion of the story.
O'Connor's second most famous story, "Good Country People," is discussed to clarify her objections to rationalism. The essay on the story suggests that O'Connor's conviction that this story would not rouse the religious reader but rather the rationalists means that the story is central to understanding her quarrel with rationalism and her warnings against the dangers of nihilism.
For many readers, one of the most puzzling of O'Connor techniques is her humor, which is often thought to be inappropriate, or at least incompatible, with her religious ideas and the violence in her stories. An article argues that Henri Bergson's theories of humor help us understand how the three elements of violence, religion, and humor blend so effectively in O'Connor's fiction by showing how laughter serves a corrective social function.
Of course, some knowledge of the social context in which she wrote is also essential to fully appreciate and understand her fiction. O'Connor's life as a Catholic intellectual in Southern Bible Belt Protestantism makes it necessary to be familiar with the well defined color lines and class lines of O'Connor's childhood, as well as the transformations that took place in the South during her adulthood.
Other essays examine the role of female characters, social reality, domestic relations, romance, and symbolism. There is also discussion of her choice and use of the short story form.
Flannery O'Connor's career as a writer lasted only twelve years. However, this small corpus is as distinctive a body of work as any in modern writing. It is work that demands our full attention but eludes our full understanding.
Each essay is 5,000 words long, and all essays provide works cited and endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendices offer a section of useful reference resources:
A chronology of the author's life
A complete list of the author's works and their original dates of publication
A general bibliography
A detailed paragraph on the volume's editor
Notes on the individual chapter authors
A subject index
(Information from Salem Press.)
The Cartoons of Flannery O'Connor at Georgia College
Dr. Marshall Bruce Gentry (editor), Dr. Sarah Gordon (introduction)
Georgia College Press (January 5, 2011)
This 112-page, soft-cover coffee table book provides the never before assembled and published collection of Flannery O’Connor cartoons that appeared in four student publications at the Georgia State College for Women during her undergraduate years, 1942-45 (The Colonnade student newspaper, The Spectrum yearbook, The Corinthian literary magazine, and The Alumnae Journal), as well as those that O’Connor drew earlier for The Peabody Palladium, the student newspaper of Peabody High School in Milledgeville.
“The humor is silly, even outrageous… The same impulse that would later lead Flannery O’Connor to create the sharp-edged and often wickedly funny characters in her fiction drove her popular cartoons (mostly lino-cuts) in her years at GSCW…” writes Sarah Gordon in her introduction.
The cartoons currently are housed in the Georgia College Library Archives, as part of its permanent O’Connor Collection, along with thousands of pages of typescripts and manuscripts, photographs, tape recordings, films, letters, memorabilia and her personal library of more than 700 books and journals.
The Cartoons of Flannery O’Connor at Georgia College will be sold for $16.99 plus shipping and handling. Orders may be placed by an email to flannerycartoons@gcsu.edu or through the website at gcsu.edu/flannerycartoons. The book also will be available at the university’s downtown Milledgeville bookstore, Box Office Books, at the Old Governor’s Mansion, and at Andalusia, the O’Connor family farm.
Georgia College Press (January 5, 2011)
This 112-page, soft-cover coffee table book provides the never before assembled and published collection of Flannery O’Connor cartoons that appeared in four student publications at the Georgia State College for Women during her undergraduate years, 1942-45 (The Colonnade student newspaper, The Spectrum yearbook, The Corinthian literary magazine, and The Alumnae Journal), as well as those that O’Connor drew earlier for The Peabody Palladium, the student newspaper of Peabody High School in Milledgeville.
“The humor is silly, even outrageous… The same impulse that would later lead Flannery O’Connor to create the sharp-edged and often wickedly funny characters in her fiction drove her popular cartoons (mostly lino-cuts) in her years at GSCW…” writes Sarah Gordon in her introduction.
The cartoons currently are housed in the Georgia College Library Archives, as part of its permanent O’Connor Collection, along with thousands of pages of typescripts and manuscripts, photographs, tape recordings, films, letters, memorabilia and her personal library of more than 700 books and journals.
The Cartoons of Flannery O’Connor at Georgia College will be sold for $16.99 plus shipping and handling. Orders may be placed by an email to flannerycartoons@gcsu.edu or through the website at gcsu.edu/flannerycartoons. The book also will be available at the university’s downtown Milledgeville bookstore, Box Office Books, at the Old Governor’s Mansion, and at Andalusia, the O’Connor family farm.
A Good Hard Look: A Novel
Ann Napolitano
Penguin (July 7, 2011)
In Flannery O'Connor's hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, reckless relationships lead to a tragedy that forever alters the town and the author herself.
Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O'Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend.
Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies' organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiancé, Melvin Whiteson. Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good hard look at the choices he has made. Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame.
Melvin is not the only person in Milledgeville who starts to feel that life is passing him by. Lona Waters, the dutiful wife of a local policeman, is hired by Cookie to help create a perfect home. As Lona spends her days sewing curtains, she is given an opportunity to remember what it feels like to be truly alive, and she seizes it with both hands.
Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses through life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery's observation that "the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
(Information from amazon.com.)
Penguin (July 7, 2011)
In Flannery O'Connor's hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, reckless relationships lead to a tragedy that forever alters the town and the author herself.
Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O'Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend.
Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies' organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiancé, Melvin Whiteson. Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good hard look at the choices he has made. Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame.
Melvin is not the only person in Milledgeville who starts to feel that life is passing him by. Lona Waters, the dutiful wife of a local policeman, is hired by Cookie to help create a perfect home. As Lona spends her days sewing curtains, she is given an opportunity to remember what it feels like to be truly alive, and she seizes it with both hands.
Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses through life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery's observation that "the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
(Information from amazon.com.)