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

The Passing and the Passing Through

This chapter begins with Harry Dean and his half-brother Stanley McKnight Jr. going to their mother Ersel's funeral, both stoned on marijuana. Ersel's drinking, gambling and periodic disappearances had left both with bitter memories even though she and Harry Dean had reconciled before her death. Back in Los Angeles Harry Dean was living with actress Maggie Blye and rode through the New Hollywood wave with roles in key films such as Wise Blood (1979), Alien (1979), and The Rose (1979). As bogus preacher Asa Hawks in John Huston's Wise Blood he tapped into the hard-shell fundamentalism of his rural Kentucky roots. John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981) and Christine (1983) introduced him to a new generation of fans as did The Rose (1979) and later Pretty in Pink (1986). On the set of Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart (1981) he met possibly the love of his life, Rebecca De Mornay, but she would later drop him for heartthrob Tom Cruise. It was his work with European directors Ulu Grosbard in Straight Time (1978) and Bertrand Tavernier in Death Watch (1980), however, that set the stage for the greatest roles of his career.

a Literary History of Mental Captivity in the United States. Blood Meridian, Wise Blood, and Contemporary Political Discourse

On July 15, 2018, US President Donald Trump and Russia President Vladimir Putin held a summit in Helsinki that immediately set off a chain reaction throughout the world. By now, barely two months later, that summit is all but forgotten for the most part, superseded by the frantic train of events and the subsequent bombardment from the media that have become the “new normal.” While the iron secrecy surrounding the conversation between the two dignitaries allowed for all kinds of speculation, the image of president Trump bowing to his Russian counterpart (indeed a treasure trove for semioticians) became for many observers in the US and across the world the living proof of Mr. Trump´s subservient allegiance to Mr. Putin and his obscure designs. Even some of the most recalcitrant GOPs vented quite publicly their disgust at the sight of a president paying evident homage to the archenemy of the United States, as Vercingetorix kneeled down before Julius Cesar in recognition of the Gaul´s surrender to the might of the Roman Empire. For some arcanereason, the whole episode of the Helsinki summit brought to my mind, as in a vivid déjà vu, Cormac McCarthy´s novel Blood Meridian and more specifically, the characters of Judge Holden and the idiotic freak who becomes Holden´s ludicrous disciple in the wastelands of Arizona. In my presentation, I will provide some possible explanations as to why I came to blend these two unrelated episodes into a single continuum. In the process, I will briefly revisit some key texts in the American canon that fully belong in the history of “mental captivity” in the United States, yet to be written. Obviously, I am not in hopes of deciphering the ultimate reasons for current US foreign policy, and the more modest aim of my presentation today is to offer some insights into the general theme of our conference through a novel and a textual tradition overpopulated with “captive minds.”

States of Salvation: Wise Blood and the Rise of the Neoliberal Right

Situating Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood in the changing racial geographies of post-World War II Atlanta, this essay argues that Hazel Motes's religious journey toward embracing Jesus as his Savior allegorizes a recuperative fantasy of the white Southern subject's journey from Jim Crowto white flight. Through this journey, Wise Blood offers an astute vision of the racial struggles over Atlanta, out of which neoliberalism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; thus, we might reconsider O'Connor as a central participant in the aesthetic and political struggles over the making of postwar urban space and politics.