Flannery O'Connor's South (The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History)

By Robert Coles

Book Overview

"Flannery O'Connor's South" offers a forceful analysis, both literary and philosophical, of Flannery O'Connor's life and literature. First published in 1980, this study draws upon Robert Coles' personal experiences in the South during the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, his brief acquaintance with Flannery O'Connor, and his careful readings of her works. The voices and gestures of the people Coles met in the South help illuminate the social scene that influenced one of the region's most valuable and interesting writers.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807106550
• ISBN13: 9780807106556
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Discusses O'Connor's view of the 1960s South, its alienation and views she held as a Catholic, South

Coles describes the "social scene" and the civil rights movement in Georgia during the early 1960s. Contrasts O'Connor's "northern reader"-- and the perspective of the South that he or she brings to a reading -- with the version of reality that O'Connor saw and portrayed in her fiction. Discusses her view of the grotesque, her treatment of black characters, and the various philosophical and religious themes seen in her work. Provides a fairly close, but informal reading of "The Displaced Person." Sees it as reflective of the South as a region, and asserts that, through this story, O'Connor "pursued her main business of storytelling as a means of showing the depth of God's mysteries." Contends that the result is "a series of reminders about God's earth as well as His universe, [and] His Commandments," resulting in "a rare and exceedingly high kind of sociology, history, [and] social psychology." Discusses her comment that the South's alienation was "`not alienation enough,'" and her belief that the South was finding itself forced not only out of its sins, but its "`few virtues'" as well. Considers such topics as: pride, intellectual conviction, "practical heresies, the South's "`old-time religion,'" and "backwoods fundamentalism" as seen in "Parker's Back," "Good Country People," and "The Artificial Nigger." Suggests that O'Connor's "own theological sophistication enabled her to connect the sights and sounds of back-country, southern twentieth-century life to a history that began in Christ's time, and even before." Coles illustrates his points with lengthy explications of O'Connor's novel, Wise Blood and her story, "Parker's Back." Regards O'Connor as a "Southern intellectual" who "steeped herself" in literature, religion, art, psychology, and in "her own sharp fashion, the South's social and political matters." Sees this background evident in "her repeated jabs at social science, psychology, theorists, and ... the entire liberal, secular world." Reads "The Lame Shall Enter First" as O'Connor's attempt "to dramatize an incompatibility she has seen about her in this modern world: intellectuals who mock traditional religion, then take a certain religious way of getting along with others." Contrasts intellectual and spiritual knowledge in "Good Country People," "The Enduring Chill" and The Violent Bear It Away. Refers to works by Simone Weil, St. Thomas Aquinas, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Georges Bernanos. Concludes that O'Connor was "a writer with few peers...of enormous promise...a soul blinded by faith; hence with an uncanny endowment of sight." R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University