The Otherness Within: Gnostic Readings in Marcel Proust, Flannery O'Connor, and Francois Villon

By Jefferson Humphries

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807110892
• ISBN13: 9780807110898
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 0.8" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Offers a close reading of Flannery O'Connor's "The Enduring Chill"...

For the O'Connor scholar, Humphries devotes two chapters for discussion of O'Connor's affinities and possible indebtedness to Marcel Proust (Chapter 6, "Proust, Flannery O'Connor and the Aesthetic of Violence" and Chapter 7, "Art, Delusion, Disease and Reality: The Apotheosis of Asbury Fox in 'The Enduring Chill'"). Provides a close reading of O'Connor's "The Enduring Chill," with numerous references to a variety of her other stories and two novels. Finds her use of physical violence helpful in casting "shadows" in such a manner that they positively articulate the "negative space" that Proust explored. Suggests that O'Connor's "The Enduring Chill" did not reach its final form until after she had read Proust. Contends that the story can be read as "a parodic retelling of the 'happy' tale which many readers seem determined to read in Proust's work -- that is, Marcel Proust's discovery of art as an vocation and his transmogrification as artiste -- whether or not [O'Connor] had Proust consciously in mind." R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University