Flannery O'Connor in the age of terrorism : essays on violence and grace /
edited by Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo.
- 1st ed.
- Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press,
- xvii, 277 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Part 1: Reading O'Connor's Violence -- And the Violent Bear It Away: O'Connor and the Menace of Apocalyptic Terrorism / Anthony Di Renzo -- The Violence of Technique and the Technique of Violence / Christina Bieber Lake -- God may Strike You Thisaway: Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil on Affliction and Joy / Ralph C. Wood -- Eating the Bread of Life: Muted Violence in the Violent Bear It Away / J. Ramsey Michaels -- Toward a Consistent Ethic of Life in O'Connor's A Stroke of Good Fortune / Linda Naranjo-Huebl -- Part 2: Connecting O'Connor's Violence -- Gory Stories: O'Connor and American Horror / Jon Lance Bacon -- All the Dead Bodies: O'Connor and Noir / William Brevda -- How the Symbol Means: Deferral vs. Confrontation in The Sound and the Fury and The Artificial Nigger / John D. Sykes Jr. -- Violence, Nature, and Prophecy in Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy / Farrell O'Gorman -- Shiftlet's Choice: O'Connor's Fordist Love Story / Doug Davis -- Part 3: Theorizing O'Connor's Violence -- O'Connor as Miscegenationist / Marshall Bruce Gentry -- The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Problems in Interpreting the Life of Flannery O'Connor / W.A. Sessions -- Confinement and Violence, Flannery and Foucault / William Monroe -- On Belief, Conflict, and Universality: Flannery O'Connor, Walter Benn Michaels and Slavoj Zizek / Thomas F. Haddox -- Everything That Rises Does Not Converge: The State of O'Connor Studies / Robert Donahoo.
In any age, humans wrestle with apparently inexorable forces. Today, we face the threat of global terrorism. In the aftermath of September 11, few could miss sensing that a great evil was at work in the world. In Flannery O'Connor's time, the threats came from different sources, World War II, the Cold War, and the Korean conflict, but they were just as real. She, too, lived though a "time of terror." The first major critical volume on Flannery O'Connor's work in more than a decade, this work explores issues of violence, evil, and terror themes that were never far from O'Connor's reach and that seem particularly relevant to our present day setting. The fifteen essays collected here offer a wide range of perspectives that explore our changing views of violence in a post-9/11 world and inform our understanding of a writer whose fiction abounds in violence. Written by both established and emerging scholars, the pieces that the editors selected offer a compelling and varied picture of this iconic author and her work. Included are comparisons of O'Connor to 1950s writers of noir literature and to the contemporary American novelist Cormac McCarthy; cultural studies that draw on horror comics of the Cold War and on Fordism and the American mythos of the automobile; and pieces that shed new light on O'Connor's complex religious sensibility and its role in her work. While continuing to speak fresh truths about her own time, O'Connor's fiction also resonates deeply with the postmodern sensibilities of audiences increasingly distant from her era, readers absorbed in their own terrors and sense of looming, ineffable threats. This collection presents O'Connor's work as a touchstone for understanding where our culture has been and where we are now.
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O'Connor, Flannery--Criticism and interpretation. O'Connor, Flannery.