Daily Schedule and Reading Assignments.pdf

Narrative Daily Schedule and Reading Assignment

for “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor,” 1-30 July 2014

Preliminary Reading Assignment: NEH Summer Scholars are strongly encouraged to prepare for

the Institute by reading materials that, if needed, we can provide by mail prior to the Institute:

O’Connor’s works assigned for seminars (from Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works); two

books that will be assigned in seminars; and Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery. We will also

provide Summer Scholars with the full list of seminar reading assignments and a list of assigned

articles available online. NEH Summer Scholars should also consult The Manuscripts of

Flannery O’Connor at Georgia College and Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being

in order to help refine their research/teaching goals for the Institute. These books are no longer

in print, but NEH Summer Scholars should be able to find them through their home libraries or

through interlibrary loan at their home institutions.

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Opening Activities—July 1-6, Tuesday-Sunday: These days will include orientation meetings,

opening lectures, consultation with staff, and general welcome.

July 1, Tuesday: Arrival day, moving into dormitory, making financial arrangements,

getting acquainted at evening reception at home of Elaine Whitaker, Chair of

Georgia College Dept. of English and Rhetoric. Food at dormitory during

moving-in and food at reception will be donated.

July 2, Wednesday: Presentations by Nancy Davis Bray and Joshua Kitchens on

resources and regulations for the Georgia College O’Connor Collection. Tour of

Georgia College Library and Instructional Technology Center.

July 3, Thursday: Self-introductions by Summer Scholars. Formation into seminar

groups A, B, C.

Lecture by Avis Hewitt on research and teaching applications of the O’Connor

Collection. Visit to O’Connor Room in Georgia College Museum.

July 4, Friday: Andalusia picnic for Independence Day, during which Summer Scholars

will

meet Elizabeth Wylie, Executive Director of the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia

Foundation, who will discuss ways in which Andalusia can assist in dissemination

of Institute products. Film version of “The Displaced Person,” for which

Andalusia farm provided the set, will be shown.

July 5, Saturday: Lectures by Sarah Gordon on O’Connor’s writing and cartooning

while she was being educated in Milledgeville and by Robert Wilson on Milledgeville history.

Visits to local sites: Old Governor’s Mansion, Old Capitol Museum, O’Connor’s Grave at

Memory Hill Cemetery, Central State Hospital.

July 6, Sunday: Welcome party at home of Marshall Bruce Gentry and Alice Friman.

Food will be donated.

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July 7-11, Monday-Friday: Seminar Week One: “Violence and Race in O’Connor’s Works”

with Seminar Leaders Gary M. Ciuba and Doreen Fowler.

July 7: Group C works in O’Connor Collection.

Conferences with Ciuba and Fowler during day.

July 7: 7:30 pm Lecture by Ciuba, “Exposing the Victim / Victimizing the Exposé:

Parody and Persecution in ‘The Partridge Festival’” (This address will explore

how O’Connor’s “The Partridge Festival,” a story set at Central State Hospital

(visited July 5) radically reconsiders O’Connor’s own fiction. The short story

re-examines her career-long concern with persecutors and the persecuted, and it

self-consciously seeks a different fictional form for her demythologization of

scapegoating.)


July 8: Seminar by Ciuba with Group A—

9 am-noon: Statement by Ciuba on “Reading O’Connor’s Violence I”: My

seminar will reconsider my lecture, O’Connor’s fictional confrontation with what

René Girard has identified as mimetic desire, sacred violence, and surrogate

victimization, as well as Girardian readings of O’Connor. In the first session of

the seminar, participants will study excerpts from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

to gain a greater understanding of Girardian theory, particularly the role of

imitative desire, scandal, violence, communal persecution, the pharmakos,

sacrificial substitution, and the violent genesis of culture. Girard contends that the

task of the novel is to expose the romance of desire and violence at the heart of

culture. Members of the seminar will consider to what extent A Good Man Is

Hard to Find accepts, struggles with, or rejects such an anti-sacrificial mission.

Readings: Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Trans./Foreword by James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001. Read “Foreword” by James G. Williams, ix-xxiii; “Scandal Must Come,” 7-18; “The Founding Murder,” 82-94; “Scapegoat,” 154-60. O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Library of America, 1988. 133-327. 1-4 pm: Statement by Ciuba on “Reading O’Connor’s Violence II”: In the second

session of the seminar, participants will study two examples of O’Connor

criticism that have been written from a Girardian perspective. They will explore

what gets revealed and what gets obscured by such readings as they focus on The

Violent Bear It Away. Members of the seminar will consider how Girardian theory

might be applied to viewing the current state of O’Connor studies. Finally, they

will relocate the issues of “The Partridge Festival” to the very day and hour at

GCSU by reconsidering how the NEH Institute itself might be viewed via

Girard’s work as, if not “The Milledgeville Festival,” then at least a festival in

Milledgeville.

Readings: Ciuba, Gary. “‘Like a Boulder Blocking Your Path’: Scandal and Skandalon in

Flannery O’Connor.” The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 26-27 (1998-2000): 1-23. Desmond, John. “Violence and the Christian Mystery: A Way to Read Flannery O’Connor.” Flannery O’Connor and the Christian Mystery. Literature and Belief 17 (1997): 128-47.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Violent Bear It Away. Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Library of America, 1988. 329- 479.

July 8: Seminar by Fowler with Group B—

Statement by Fowler: O’Connor wrote from 1952 to1964, years of racial upheaval

in the American South, and her fiction analyzes and critiques a Southern

resistance to racial integration. More specifically, O’Connor’s fiction traces the

roots of this white Southern resistance to a fear of a loss of a white identity that

seems to be distinguished by the dialectics of domination. According to Lacan

and other theorists, identity depends on difference, and difference seems to

require the marginalization of another in a binary opposition. For example, white

is either white or it is black, one thing or the other; and if white and black are

similar or equal, then the meanings of both terms seem to be blurred. In story after

story, O’Connor’s texts take up this troubling exclusionary, either-or logic to

rethink and rewrite it. In this seminar, we will use psychoanalytic, deconstructive,

and critical race theory to interpret O’Connor’s depiction of race as a signifier—

or symbol—that is used in culture to mark and define a “white” identity. Our

study will also be guided by Toni Morrison, who, in Playing in the Dark, maps

out an overlooked area of critical investigation—the literary uses to which white

writers put an invented “Africanist other.” In particular, we will focus on a

challenge that Morrison issues to scholars of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. In

Playing in the Dark, she points out that critics of O’Connor’s fiction have yet to

investigate the “connection between God’s grace and Africanist ‘othering’ in

Flannery O’Connor” (14). We will take up the project that Morrison outlines—

how race, as a marker of white and black identity, facilitates the action of grace in

O’Connor’s fiction. In story after story, particularly in O’Connor’s later fiction,

an often violent contact between black and white characters precipitates the action

of grace. In “The Artificial Nigger,” the mysterious lawn statuary has a healing

effect on Mr. Head and Nelson; in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the

violent collision of the African American lady on the bus and Julian’s mother

enables a moment of redemptive grace for Julian; in “Judgment Day,” a violent

confrontation between Tanner and the black actor leads to a moment of grace. By

reading these violent encounters through theoretical models like deconstruction,

the uncanny double, and the social construction of race, we will explore the

mystery of why violent collisions with those who have been culturally defined as

“other” become opportunities for grace.

9 am-noon: Statement by Fowler on “Reading Race in O’Connor Alongside

Toni Morrison I”: We will review readings on Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Lopez, and

Morrison, and then interpret the following works through these theoretical

models: “The Geranium”; “The Barber,” “Wildcat,” “A Late Encounter with the

Enemy.”

1-4 pm: Statement by Fowler on “Reading Race in O’Connor Alongside Toni

Morrison II”: We will continue our analysis of the short fiction, focusing on these

stories: “The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Greenleaf,” “A View

of the Woods,” “The Enduring Chill,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,”

“Revelation,” and “Judgment Day.”

Readings for both sessions: Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Read Chapter 4 on Post-Structuralism, pp. 110-16 (Derrida and Deconstruction) and Chapter 5 on Psychoanalysis, pp. 131- 48 (Freud and Lacan). Lopez, Ian F. Haney. “The Social Construction of Race.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 964-74. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993. O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, 1972. “The

Geranium,” “The Barber,” “Wildcat,” “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” “The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Greenleaf,” “A View of the Woods,” “The Enduring Chill,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Revelation,” “Judgment Day.”



July 9: 7:30 pm Lecture by Fowler, “Flannery O’Connor’s Racial Politics”


Seminar by Ciuba with Group B (see description and assignments under July 8)

Seminar by Fowler with Group A (see description and assignments under July 8)

7:30 pm Readings by Georgia College Creative Writing Faculty



July 13, Sunday: Field trip to Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home, Savannah.

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July 14-18, Monday-Friday: Seminar Week Two: “O’Connor on Religion and the Intellect”

with Seminar Leaders Christina Bieber Lake and Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

July 14: Group B works in O’Connor Collection.

Conferences with Lake and Brinkmeyer during day.

July 14: 7:30 pm Lecture by Lake, “What Exactly is ‘Wise Blood’?: Flannery O’Connor,

Literary Darwinism, and the Question of Human Universals”

July 15: Group B works in O’Connor Collection. July 15: Seminar by Lake with Group A—

Statement by Lake: Following the lead of E. O. Wilson in Consilience, a new

generation of critics is arguing for a radical paradigm shift in knowledge

acquisition in the humanities. A pioneer in the field of sociobiology, Wilson

insists that what we need to know about human nature and culture can be learned

primarily from adaptive evolutionary theory—and not from theology or

philosophy. Working together in a field commonly called Literary Darwinism, an

increasing number of critics are drawing upon new research in cognitive

psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory to reconsider a wide range of

literary texts. This criticism boldly and unapologetically rejects all constructivist

and theological accounts of human nature in its effort to explain elements of

stories and the storytelling impulse in terms of biologically determined

universals. In this seminar we will endeavor to answer the question of the utility

of this new paradigm for literary studies in general as well as for the treatment of

O'Connor’s work in particular, in order to move later toward a consideration of

how O’Connor’s work addresses the ethical ramifications of materialist

conceptions of human nature.

9 am-noon: Statement by Lake on “O’Connor and Literary Darwinism”: The first

session is designed to continue the conversation I hope to start in my evening

lecture.

Readings: Carroll, Joseph. Introduction and Chapter 1, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study” in Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice. Albany: SUNY P, 2011. Gottschall, Jonathan. Preface, Introduction, and Part I of Literature, Science, and a New Humanities. Palgrave, 2001. Hillyer, Aaron. “Becoming Human, Becoming Animal: The Anthropological Machine at Work in Wise Blood.” In Wise Blood: A Reconsideration. Ed. John J. Han. New York: Rodopi, 2011. 119-40. O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” and “A Stroke of Good Fortune.” Sugiyama, Michelle. "New Science, Old Myth: An Evolutionary Critique of the Oedipal Paradigm." Mosaic 34.1 (2001): 121+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Dec. 2012. 1-4 pm: Statement by Lake on “O’Connor and the Ethics of Personhood”: We

will turn to “Parker’s Back,” “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann” and The

Violent Bear It Away to consider implications of this trend for the ethics of

personhood. By reading together sections of Robert Spaemann’s theological

anthropology, as well as Marilynne Robinson’s rejection of parascientific

accounts of the human person in Absence of Mind, we will consider the ways that

O'Connor’s prose is consonant with rich accounts of the imagination even as it

resists the reductive tendencies of naturalist materialist philosophy.

Readings: Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. Spaemann, Robert. “Introduction” and Chap. 18 “Are All Human Beings Persons?” in Persons: The Difference between 'Someone' and 'Something'. Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. O’Connor, Flannery. “Parker’s Back,” “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann,” and The Violent Bear It Away. July 15: Seminar by Brinkmeyer with Group C—

9 am-noon: Statement by Brinkmeyer on “O’Connor and Southern

Fundamentalism”: This seminar will explore Flannery O’Connor’s attitudes

toward and relationship with Southern fundamentalism. After first establishing the

tensions between the fundamentalism of Southern culture in which O’Connor

lived and the Roman Catholicism of her belief, the seminar will explore how and

why O’Connor found these tensions invigorating, even nurturing, for her as

believer and artist. The seminar will focus on several of O’Connor’s essays from

Mystery and Manners, Wise Blood, several of her stories, and selected secondary

criticism.

Readings: Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. “‘Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart!': Wise Blood, Wounding, and Sacramental Aesthetics,” in New Essays on Wise Blood. Ed. Michael Kreyling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 71-89. ---. “A Closer Walk with Thee: Flannery O’Connor and Southern Fundamentalists.” Southern Literary Journal 18.2 (1986): 3-13. Fitzgerald, Jonathan. “The Protestant World: Flannery O’Connor’s Portrayal of

the Modern Protestant South in Wise Blood,” in Wise Blood: A Reconsideration. Ed. John J. Han. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 25-41.

O’Connor, Flannery. “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” and “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners; Wise Blood. Wood, Ralph. “Flannery O’Connor’s Strange Alliance with Southern Fundamentalists,” in Flannery O’Connor and the Christian Mystery. Ed. John Murphy and Linda Adams. Provo, UT: Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature, Brigham Young University, 1997.

1-4 pm: Statement by Brinkmeyer on “O’Connor, the Intellectual and the Anti-

Intellectual”: This seminar will explore O’Connor’s conflicted feelings toward

intellectuals and intellectual endeavor. Despite being an intellectual herself,

widely and deeply read, particularly in literature and theology, O’Connor was

deeply skeptical of pursuits of the mind. In her letters, she often casually (and

comically) dismissed her own intellectualism, and in her fiction she repeatedly

brought intellectuals under her withering gaze and criticism. This seminar will

explore O’Connor’s paradoxical “intellectual anti-intellectualism,” examining

ways in which O’Connor embraced and made use of the anti-intellectualism of

her Southern culture, all the while that she remained a staunch intellectual, a

thinker and believer characterized by one critic as a “Hillbilly Thomist.”

O’Connor’s anti-intellectualism in her self-representation, her faith, and her

fiction will be examined.

Readings: Coles, Robert. “Flannery O’Connor: A Southern Intellectual.” Southern Review 16 (1980): 46-64. May, John R. “The Pruning Word: Flannery O’Connor’s Judgment of Intellectuals.” Southern Humanities Review 4 (1970): 325-38. O’Connor, Flannery. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “Revelation,” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge”; The Violent Bear It Away; selected letters from The Habit of Being; selected book reviews from The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews Powell, Tara. “Flannery O’Connor’s Interleckchul Distress,” in The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

UP, 2012.



July 16: 7:30 pm Lecture by Brinkmeyer, “Reading Flannery O’Connor Alongside Eudora Welty” July 17: Group B works in O’Connor Collection.

Seminar by Lake with Group C (see description and assignments under July 15)

Seminar by Brinkmeyer with Group A (see description and assignments under

July 15)



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July 19, Saturday: Field trip to Emory University, Atlanta, with lecture by W. A. Sessions on

O’Connor-related collections at Emory.

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July 21-25, Monday-Friday: Seminar Week Three: “O’Connor Questions Goodness and

Questions Her Culture,” with Seminar Leaders Virginia Wray and Brad Gooch, Visiting Lecturer

Nagueyalti Warren.

July 21: Group A works in O’Connor Collection.

Conferences with Wray and Gooch during day.

July 21: 7:30 pm Lecture by Wray, “‘So Much to Be Thankful For’: Maritain Introduces Aquinas to the Modern World”


July 22: Seminar by Wray with Group B—

9 am-noon: Statement by Wray on “‘One of my own’: Flannery O’Connor,

Charity, and Accusations of Racism I”: I want the seminar to look closely at

several stories in order to come to a common definition of what constitutes bad

(or good) moral or ethical behavior in O’Connor’s fiction. By the end of the

morning I will have invited discussion of charity and begun to bring into our

discussion Aquinas’ thoughts on charity.

Readings: Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, “Treatise on the Theological Virtues,” Questions 23-27. Lipovski-Helal, Kathleen. “Flannery O’Connor’s Encounter with Mary Ann Long.” Flannery O’Connor Review, forthcoming 2013. O’Connor, Flannery. “The Life You Save,” “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “The Comforts of Home,” and “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann.” Park, Clara Claiborne. “Crippled Laughter: Toward Understanding of Flannery O’Connor.” American Scholar 51.2 (1982): 249-57. Ragen, Brian Abel. “Daredevil Charity: Love and Family in O’Connor’s ‘The Comforts of Home.’” Proceedings of the Northeast Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, Regis College, 10-12 Oct. 1998. Ed. Joan F. Hallisey and Mary-Anne Vetterling. Weston, MA: Regis College, 1996. 102-07. 1-4 pm: Statement by Wray on “‘One of my own’: Flannery O’Connor, Charity,

and Accusations of Racism II”: I want us to take our working conclusions from

the morning session about good and bad behaviors and apply them to several

O’Connor texts that contain African American characters. We will expand our

definition of bad behavior to include racism, a task that likely will not be as easy

as participants might expect it to be. We will conclude by turning our attention to

the numerous accusations of racism aimed at O’Connor herself in the early 1990s

after her correspondence with her friend Maryat Lee was made public. I hope that

further discussion of Aquinas on charity and the theory of “ethic of

responsibility” that Susan Srigley argues in her Flannery O’Connor’s

Sacramental Art can put such ad hominem accusations to rest.

Readings: Bottom, J. “Flannery O’Connor Banned.” Crisis 18.9 (Oct. 2000): 48-49. (Or: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0074.html) Giannone, Richard. “‘The Artificial Nigger’ and the Redemptive Quality of Suffering.” The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 12 (1983): 5-16. Gordon, Sarah. “Maryat and Julian and the ‘Not so Bloodless Revolution.’” The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 21 (1992): 25-36. O’Connor, Flannery. “The Artificial Nigger,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “The Enduring Chill,” and “Revelation.” Srigley, Susan. Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2004. Chapter 1, “Sacramental Theology and Incarnational Art,” 9-54. Wood, Ralph C. “Where Is the Voice Coming From? Flannery O’Connor on Race.” The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 22 (1993-94): 90-118. July 22: Seminar by Gooch with Group C—

9am-noon: Statement by Gooch on “Was Flannery O’Connor a Mystic? From ‘A Prayer

Journal’ to ‘Revelation’”: I was recently on a panel in Key West on the topic of mystic

writers. I was speaking on Rumi; Edmund White on Rimbaud; Paul Mariani on Gerard

Manley Hopkins. The moderator said, “Of course Flannery O’Connor was a mystic!” I

disagreed, saying that she certainly would never have thought of herself in those terms.

Sarah Gordon was in the audience that day and she told me that she thought I was quite

right on that score. Yet looking at O’Connor’s recently released “A Prayer Journal,” she

writes, “I would like to be a mystic and immediately!” As with all things O’Connor, the

answer to the question I’ve posed for this seminar is not simple. But to try to get closer to

a full answer, I propose looking with NEH Summer Scholars at the train of clues, and

decoys, left by O’Connor on this issue, with special attention to her “Prayer Journal,” her

“Hillbilly Thomist” pose examined in my published talk “Thirteenth-Century Lady,” her

stories, especially “The Temple of the Holy Ghost” and “Revelation,” and her

relationship to Teilhard de Chardin, in reviews and letters. We will look at the issue

biographically rather than with an essentialist bias, discovering the meaning of “mystic”

to her at different stages of life.

1-4pm: Statement by Gooch on “Flannery Among the New Critics: Autobiography and

Intimacy in ‘The Life you Save May Be Your Own,’ ‘Good Country People,’ ‘The

Enduring Chill,’ and ‘Revelation’”: Flannery O’Connor was deeply influenced by the

New Critics, much in vogue when she studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop. We will

first look at T.S. Eliot’s critical essay “Traditional and the Individual Talent” to establish

a baseline of New Criticism, and then we will look at some of O’Connor’s own

statements about the relationship between biography and literature. New Critic or not,

like Eliot, O’Connor was invested in complicating the relationship between life and art

for anyone interested in that connection in her work, as in her funny, and perhaps coy,

insistence that “…there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason,

lives spent between the house and chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” After

examining theoretical issues, touching on the differences between modern and post-

modern approaches to the nexus of life and art, we will spend the second half of the

seminar in close readings of four stories of O’Connor’s that tease out the issues of

biographical reading of her work: “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good

Country People,” “The Enduring Chill,” and “Revelation.” We will discuss the tact

needed to teach and write well about O’Connor’s work biographically.

Readings: Required: Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Gooch, Brad. FLANNERY: A Life “Thirteenth-Century Lady,” Flannery O’Connor Review, Vol. 5, 2007.

O’Connor, Flannery. A PRAYER JOURNAL COLLECTED WORKS: “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”; “Revelation” SPIRITUAL WRITINGS O’Connor, Flannery. COLLECTED WORKS: “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” “The Enduring Chill,” “Revelation.” Recommended: Elie, Paul. THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN Giannone, Richard. FLANNERY O’CONNOR: HERMIT NOVELIST

July 22: 7:30 pm: Lecture by Nagueyalti Warren on topic of race in O’Connor.



July 23: 7:30 pm: Lecture by Gooch, “Flannery and Brad: A Rocky Relationship”


Seminar by Wray with Group C (see description and assignments under July 22)

Seminar by Gooch with Group B (see description and assignments under July 22)



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Closing Activities--July 28-29, Monday-Tuesday: Final writing and consultation period,

reports by the participants on their accomplishments during Institute / plans for future, with

feedback from Gentry and Donahoo. Elizabeth Wylie will consult with NEH Summer Scholars

about dissemination of Institute results through the Andalusia website.

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July 30, Wednesday: Departure day, with final wrap-up work with some participants as needed.

Documents

Daily Schedule and Reading Assignments.pdf