Acclaimed author and Catholic thinker Flannery O'Connor (1925--1964) penned two novels, two collections of short stories, various essays, and numerous book reviews over the course of her life. Her ...work continues to fascinate, perplex, and inspire new generations of readers and poses important questions about human nature, ethics, social change, equality, and justice. Although political philosophy was not O'Connor's pursuit, her writings frequently address themes that are not only crucial to American life and culture, but also offer valuable insight into the interplay between fiction and politics.
A Political Companion to Flannery O'Connorexplores the author's fiction, prose, and correspondence to reveal her central ideas about political thought in America. The contributors address topics such as O'Connor's affinity with writers and philosophers including Eric Voegelin, Edith Stein, Russell Kirk, and the Agrarians; her attitudes toward the civil rights movement; and her thoughts on controversies over eugenics. Other essays in the volume focus on O'Connor's influences, the principles underlying her fiction, and the value of her work for understanding contemporary intellectual life and culture.
Examining the political context of O'Connor's life and her responses to the critical events and controversies of her time, this collection offers meaningful interpretations of the political significance of this influential writer's work.
...human life "has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for" (MM 146). Or, in Guardini's words, "the brief life of God on earth is no episode ending with Jesus' death; the band ...that connects him with humanity continues through the Resurrection and Ascension into all time" (325). ...suffering can become for O'Connor and all people with faith "a shared experience with Christ" (HB 527). Because of human blindness and rigidity, "suffering is the deepest of mysteries," according to Teilhard de Chardin, whom O'Connor read with some agreement late in life (qtd. in Kilcourse 273).Teilhard also states that suffering is at first experienced as "an Adversary," but with the light of grace it can be something we come to accept as a way that "uproots our egoism and centers us more completely on God," because ultimately suffering "is a supremely active principle for the humanization and divinization of the universe" as revealed in the death and resurrection of Christ (qtd. in Kilcourse 273).
"The famous dead children of fiction are seldom considered in their own right. In part this is because their snipped-off lives are overshadowed by the parents and guardians who are unable to save ...them, or are unequal to the task of grieving their loss, or who in certain instances actively seek their destruction. The victim children acquire dramatic and poetic interest less through what they are able to express in their individual fates, than through the dire or sorrowing uses that others contrive for them--not only before their deaths, but afterward. Killing a child, even in the secure precincts of make-believe, is a chillingly extreme act, which carries with it a jolt of the forbidden thought, and a sense of venturing close to a limit where, superstition cautions, an infectious power lurks...One might well ask: For what purposes and imaginative ends are these fictive children made to die? To serve the demands of story? To show that even the most unbearable experiences can be brought under aesthetic control? What aspects of child and parent 'brokenness' are taken on by the writer in the act of 'seeing the death through'?" (Raritan) In this essay, George Toles examines the "meanings of child death in Flannery O'Connor's work, with special emphasis on the drowning murder of the mentally handicapped boy, Bishop, in The Violent Bear It Away."
John Millis, personal conversation, December 1996 THERE is a persistent misgiving that Flannery O'Connor delighted in death, that she nurtured an incurable malignancy of the imagination, that a ...fundamental malevolence pervades her fiction, and thus that she reveled in the destruction of bodies if not also souls. Why does God do such terrible violence to his faithful ones? Then there is the cosmic question: How might a proper response to such undeserved suffering offer a potential answer to the unprecedented violence of the late modern world? O'CONNOR'S wry confession that she spent her mornings writing and her afternoons recovering has led most of us to assume that she was exhausted by the mental exactions of her craft alone.\n There is japery here, something slapstick and buffoonish at work, almost a charade quality about them all - as if the deepest things cannot be said but only gestured and mimed. What enables this scene to accomplish more than the awakening of a brilliant but proud young girl to her own religious vocation is that the hermaphrodite has borne his affliction in the region that our late modern world regards as the ultimate denning center of human life: his sexuality.
During her short writing life, which produced a small collection of two novels, two short story collections and various essays and letters, O'Connor managed to gain a foothold in the American psyche ...as she became a highly esteemed writer, winning three prestigious O. Henry Awards for best short story (the last one posthumously), among other grants and fellowships.2 Her story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" (1955) was made into a television movie (1957),3 and she was interviewed on television and became a frequent speaker on the lecture circuit. 8 In June, Mary Ann Anderson's literary exploration of Andalusia was published in several regional newspapers, including The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), which urged readers to visit O'Connor's farm and read her fiction.9 The August 2009 Oxford American magazine rated O'Connor's Wise Blood as the #9 Best Southern Novel of all time.10 And in November 2009, after the National Book Awards announced six finalists for their first ever "Best of the National Book Award" (to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the award), a public vote on the National Book Foundation website resulted in the choice of O'Connor's The Complete Stories (1971).
