o'connor's ppt
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O'Connor's religionTRANSCRIPT
HER RELIGION IN STORIES
Flannery O’Connor
FAMOUS WORKS
Wise Blood (1952)- first novel
The Violent Bear it Away (1960)- her second, and
final novel.
A Good Man is Hard to Find, and other stories
(1955)- book of short stories
Complete Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1971)-
book of short stories released after her death.
HER RELIGION
Flannery was a devout Catholic, and her religion greatly influenced her outlook on life and her work.
BELIEFS
With the exception of a number of the early
stories, O'Connor consistently produced fiction
having an implicit, if not a totally explicit,
religious world view as an integral element of
each work.
WRITINGS
In numerous articles and letters to her friends,
O'Connor stressed the need for the Catholic writer to
make fiction "according to its nature . . . by grounding
it in concrete observable reality" because when the
Catholic writer "closes his own eyes and tries to see
with the eyes of the Church, the result is another
addition to that large body of pious trash for which
we have so long been famous." As she noted in one
article, "When people have told me that because I am
a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply,
ruefully, that because I am a Catholic, I cannot afford
to be less than an artist
COMMENTS
"They didn't want to hear what I said and
when they heard it they didn't want to believe it
and so they changed it. I also told them that the
average Catholic reader was a Militant Moron
but they didn't quote that naturally."
CHRISTIAN CONCERNS
O'Connor was, throughout her writing career,
convinced that the majority of her audience did
not share her basic viewpoint and was, if not
openly hostile to it, at best indifferent. In order
to reach such an audience, O'Connor felt that
she had to make the basic distortions of a world
separated from the original, divine plan "appear
as distortions to an audience which is used to
seeing them as natural." This she accomplished
by resorting to the grotesque in her fiction.
DOCTRINEWithout becoming totally bogged down in the
Catholic doctrine of grace (a good Catholic
dictionary will list at least ten to fifteen entries
dealing with the subject), one should be aware
of what O'Connor means when she uses the
term in connection with her stories. Loosely
defined, Illuminating Grace (the type of grace
most frequently used by O'Connor in her
stories) may be described as a gift, freely given
by God, which is designed to enlighten the
minds of people and help them toward eternal
life.
COMIC NOVEL
Even though O'Connor's vision was essentially
religious, she chose to present it from a
primarily comic or grotesque perspective. In a
note to the second edition of Wise Blood, her
first novel, O'Connor wrote, "It is a comic novel
about a Christian malgré lui [in spite of himself],
and as such, very serious, for all comic novels
that are any good must be about matters of life
and death." Several friends have verified
O'Connor's problem with public readings of her
stories.
SIN
For individuals incapable of seeing humanity as a group of
struggling manikins operating against a backdrop of eternal
purpose, many of O'Connor's stories appear to be filled with
meaningless violence. Even those characters who are granted a
moment of grace or experience an epiphanal vision do so only
at the cost of having their self-images, if not themselves,
destroyed. In a very real sense, all of O'Connor's characters
have inherited the Original Sin of Adam, and all are equally
guilty.