No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 267-275). Also available via World Wide Web.

A literary artist who has professed her religious understanding of reality provides an interesting challenge of interpretation. To what degree can the artist's religious views be considered relevant to the work of art, and how can the art be interpreted religiously without sacrificing its creative and artistic merits? While much of literary criticism seeks to distinguish the author (and the author's personal views) from his or her work, Flannery O'Connor's sacramental vision of reality is so embedded in her art that a separation between her religious understanding and her fiction leads to a misunderstanding of both. Instead of radically separating the artist's views from the artist's work, I have developed an interpretation of O'Connor that seeks to represent both her religious view of reality and her artistic exploration into the nature of reality through her fiction. This kind of analysis has two significant effects: it provides a corrective to many of the reductionistic accounts of the meaning and direction of O'Connor's religious vision, especially as it relates to her art; and it suggests an alternative approach to moral reflection through the medium of literature, whereby the concrete, embodied experiences of the characters illumine the nature of moral questions and choices. This thesis establishes, through a careful consideration ofthe prose writings of O'Connor, the inherent connection between her theology and her art. The intellectual tradition that influenced O'Connor's understanding ofart and theology, from her reading ofThomas Aquinas and Jacques Maritain, serves to clarify the orientation of her creative art. O'Connor's theological artistry is most evident in her fiction, and my interpretation focuses on an exegesis ofthree ofher major fictional works. The primary aim ofthis thesis is to elucidate O'Connor's sacramental vision and show how it is embodied in the fiction. Her prophetic vision, religious and artistic, is directed towards the drawing together of the physical and the spiritual, the concrete sensible world and the mysterious unseen reality that is eternally present. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Flannery O'Connor makes the invisible visible. Just as a speaker of sign language punctuates her narrative with signs that are at once pictures and words, O'Connor punctuates the narratives of her novels with moments or pauses in the forward motion of her text that are somehow framed--in a mirror, or in a window, for example--and that also are at once pictures and words. These pictorial moments not only occur in the reader's present, but because of the way they are stylized, they are simultaneously: open windows into the historical world of the mid-twentieth century; they look backward into the classical past; and they offer a veiled look into the mystery of a Divine reality. Examination of the chronological development and refinement of Flannery O'Connor's pictorial technique by considering the meaning conveyed by the arrangement of figures in a single panel cartoon, the contextual significance found in literary tableaux and filmic montage, the use of the pictorial "camera eye," and the imprinting of tattoo on the human body, presents a new perspective in interpreting her work. Early manifestation of the pictorial technique is evident in O'Connor's college cartoons. When that cartoonist becomes a novelist that tendency for exaggeration is evident in his or her pictorial renditions of characters and situations, as is the case with former cartoonists Faulkner, Updike, West, Cantor, and O'Connor herself. O'Connor does not abandon the power of the pictorial in delivering a message. Instead she embraces it and envelops it in narrative.

The main body of the thesis concerns itself with the beliefs and characteristics of Southern Protestantism as they appear in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor.

This video offers some quick questions/points that might be considered when writing about O'Connor's short story. / https://dc.etsu.edu/lit-outlines-complete-oer/1008/thumbnail.jpg

In this thesis, I trace the influence of French Symbolist poetry on the works of Flannery O’Connor. Many of O’Connor’s influences are well-known and documented, including Catholicism, the South, modern fiction, and her battle with lupus. However, I argue that Symbolism, via its influence on Modernist literature, is another major influence. In particular, I focus on several aspects of O’Connor’s writing: the recurrence of the same symbol across multiple works, the central location of symbols in several stories, the use of private symbols of the author’s invention, and use of symbol, rather than language, to convey transcendence. Aided by the scholarship of critics such as Richard Giannone, Laurence Porter, and Margaret Early Whitt, I argue that there is much in the aesthetic of Flannery O’Connor to suggest that her writing is, in part, a legacy of the French Symbolists.

This thesis examines the way Flannery O'Connor's stories draw upon and transfigure various biblical texts. With sometimes shocking freedom, she twists open the original stories or references, reworking and redistributing their basic elements. Often reversing the polarity of the original stories, O'Connor's stories dramatize elements of biblical texts coming alive in different times and social settings and with quite different outcomes. At the same time, her stories still address many of the same issues as the biblical texts she transforms. This study focuses on three O'Connor stories: "A Good Man is Hard to Find," which reworks the story of the rich young ruler in Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Luke 18; "Parker's Back," which transforms elements of Moses' encounter with the burning bush in Exodus juxtaposed with Saul's conversion experience in Acts 9; and "Judgment Day," which interacts with portions of Paul's descriptions of the resurrection of the dead in 1 Corinthians 15. This study draws upon the work of theologically-oriented O'Connor scholars, as well as O'Connor's own letters and essays. I hope, through this approach, to open up a new way of responding to O'Connor's biblical echoes. / Master of Arts

In her essay, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor notes, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one” (44). In the introduction to this collection, I investigate the importance of the grotesque, gothic, and surreal elements that tend to make up the depictions of the South in the works of authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Brad Watson and several horror writers, such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft, exploring how horror can be used to emphasize the stranger elements of Southern fiction. In my own stories, I present both realistic depictions of suffering and sin in the South, as well as the strange and surreal, presenting the South not just as a world for freaks, but as a freakish world in and of itself.