Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

Author: Preston M. Browning

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2009-08-18

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1606085344

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When Flannery O'Connor began writing in the early 1950's, many reviewers assumed that she was little more than a talented female Erskine Caldwell, writing in the Southern gothic mode. And indeed her work was filled with freaks, one-armed con men, and pathological killers. By the time she died in 1964, serious readers of her fiction knew there was much more involved in her stories. What that extra was she called the added dimension, that is, the spiritual depth which she believed was as an ineluctable part of human life. Her stories dramatize the ways in which the holy or the sacred break into human life with the result of shocking readers out of their spiritual somnolence using characters who appear to be possessed by the Devil and who commit acts of terrifying violence. Browning bases his study of the works of O'Connor on the centrality of the yoking of opposites at the point where the opposites coincide, where violent crime and attraction for the Holy are held in tension, suggesting that out of this tension grew O'Connor's extraordinary creative power and unique vision. From this point of departure, Browning offers a detailed analysis of four O'Connor books: Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Violent Bear It Away, and Everything That Rises Must Converge.

René Girard, Unlikely Apologist
René Girard, Unlikely Apologist

Author: Grant Kaplan

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2016-08-20

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0268100888

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Since the late 1970s, theologians have been attempting to integrate mimetic theory into different fields of theology, yet a distrust of mimetic theory persists in some theological camps. In René Girard, Unlikely Apologist: Mimetic Theory and Fundamental Theology, Grant Kaplan brings mimetic theory into conversation with theology both to elucidate the relevance of mimetic theory for the discipline of fundamental theology and to understand the work of René Girard within a theological framework. Rather than focus on Christology or atonement theory as the locus of interaction between Girard and theology, Kaplan centers his discussion on the apologetic quality of mimetic theory and the impact of mimetic theory on fundamental theology, the subdiscipline that grew to replace apologetics. His book explores the relation between Girard and fundamental theology in several keys. In one, it understands mimetic theory as a heuristic device that allows theological narratives and positions to become more intelligible and, by so doing, makes theology more persuasive. In another key, Kaplan shows how mimetic theory, when placed in dialogue with particular theologians, can advance theological discussion in areas where mimetic theory has seldom been invoked. On this level the book performs a dialogue with theology that both revisits earlier theological efforts and also demonstrates how mimetic theory brings valuable dimensions to questions of fundamental theology.

A Prayer Journal
A Prayer Journal

Author: Flannery O'Connor

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2013-11-12

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 0374709696

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"I would like to write a beautiful prayer," writes the young Flannery O'Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. "There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise." Written between 1946 and 1947 while O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O'Connor's singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. "I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You." O'Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: "Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted," she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: "Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story." As W. A. Sessions, who knew O'Connor, writes in his introduction, it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel, Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative Christian meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O'Connor's own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman's coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.

Radical Ambivalence
Radical Ambivalence

Author: Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2020-06-02

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0823288250

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Radical Ambivalence is the first book-length study of Flannery O’Connor’s attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence. It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O’Connor’s thoughts on the subject. O’Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. In one of her letters, O’Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the United States with regard to race: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.” Radical Ambivalence explores this double-mindedness and how it manifests itself in O’Connor’s fiction.

Burying the Honeysuckle Girls
Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

Author: Emily Carpenter

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781503935013

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Althea Bell is still heartbroken by her mother's tragic, premature death--and tormented by the last, frantic words she whispered into young Althea's ear: Wait for her. For the honeysuckle girl. She'll find you, I think, but if she doesn't, you find her. Adrift ever since, Althea is now fresh out of rehab and returning to her family home in Mobile, Alabama, determined to reconnect with her estranged, ailing father. While Althea doesn't expect him, or her politically ambitious brother, to welcome her with open arms, she's not prepared for the chilling revelation of a grim, long-buried family secret. Fragile and desperate, Althea escapes with an old flame to uncover the truth about her lineage. Drawn deeper into her ancestors' lives, Althea begins to unearth their disturbing history...and the part she's meant to play in it. Gripping and visceral, this unforgettable debut delves straight into the heart of dark family secrets and into one woman's emotional journey to save herself from a sinister inheritance.

Blood Meridian
Blood Meridian

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010-08-11

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0307762521

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25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past
Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past

Author: Diane J. Austin-Broos

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0226032655

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The Arrernte people of Central Australia first encountered Europeans in the 1860s as groups of explorers, pastoralists, missionaries, and laborers invaded their land. During that time the Arrernte were the subject of intense curiosity, and the earliest accounts of their lives, beliefs, and traditions were a seminal influence on European notions of the primitive. The first study to address the Arrernte’s contemporary situation, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past also documents the immense sociocultural changes they have experienced over the past hundred years. Employing ethnographic and archival research, Diane Austin-Broos traces the history of the Arrernte as they have transitioned from a society of hunter-gatherers to members of the Hermannsburg Mission community to their present, marginalized position in the modern Australian economy. While she concludes that these wrenching structural shifts led to the violence that now marks Arrernte communities, she also brings to light the powerful acts of imagination that have sustained a continuing sense of Arrernte identity.

Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love
Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love

Author: Richard Giannone

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780823219100

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"Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love interprets O'Connor's perplexing fiction on its own terms. By stepping back from prevailing controversies, this seminal study takes the pleasure of turning to the short stories and novels themselves and forming an impression of them while seeking the answers to such questions as they necessarily suggest themselves. This goal inevitably entails a consideration of the hardness and violence that are the hallmark of O'Connor's genius. That severity, for Giannone, is inseparable from O'Connor's recounting, in her words, "the action of grace." God's bounty can leave its beneficiaries with some very real handicaps." "These devastations paradoxically prepare the characters to receive and give compassion. In its numerous and disturbing forms, the coupling of violence and hardship with divine favor marks the mature nature of O'Connor's Christianity." --Book Jacket.

The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49

Author: Thomas Pynchon

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-06-13

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 1101594608

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One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years “The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.”—The New York Times “The work of a virtuoso with prose . . . His intricate symbolic order [is] akin to that of Joyce’s Ulysses.”—Chicago Tribune “A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force.”—San Francsisco Examiner The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.