Flannery O'Connor: Another Legend in Southern Fiction

1962 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvin J. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Southern Fiction

The Trouble with “Innerleckchuls”: Flannery O’Connor, Anti-Intellectualism, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-111
Author(s):  
Jordan Cofer
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Southern Fiction ◽  
New Information ◽  
Wise Blood ◽  
Writers Workshop

In dialogue with Eric Bennett and Mark McGurl’s work on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as Tara Powell’s work on archetypes, Jordan Cofer uses new information from the Emory Archive and The Prayer Journal to contextualize one of O’Connor’s most famous comedic devices: the antagonistic intellectual. Cofer argues that although this device may have roots in southern fiction, O’Connor’s anti-intellectual trope derives from her time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This chapter examines some of O’Connor’s juvenilia, the drafts of Wise Blood she was writing in Iowa (while simultaneously writing in her journal), and some of the short stories she wrote while enrolled at the Workshop. Finally, Cofer reconsiders the origins of O’Connor’s anti-intellectual as a potential outgrowth of her own anxieties during this time.

Flannery O'Connor : Un paon pour ange gardien

1988 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-48
Author(s):  
Marie-Claire Pasquier
Keyword(s):  
Flannery O'connor

The Fable of the Writer in Southern Fiction

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 249-266
Author(s):  
Lewis P. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Fiction ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County ◽  
The One

No scene in Faulkner is more compelling than the one that transpires on a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon” in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, toward the end of the first decade of this century. Quentin Compson sits with Miss Rosa Coldfield in a “dim airless room” still called “the office because her father called it that,” and listens to Miss Rosa tell her version of the story of the “demon” Sutpen and his plantation, Sutpen's Hundred. As she talks “in that grim haggard amazed voice”—“vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand”—the 22-year-old Mississippi youth discovers he is hearing not Miss Rosa but the voices of “two separate Quentins.” One voice is that of the “Quentin preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous baffled ghosts.” The other voice is that of the Quentin “who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she [Miss Rosa] was.” The two Quentins talk “to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage: It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation”.

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