Flannery O’Connor: Literature, Violence, and the American Gothic

During her remarkably productive though truncated lifetime, Flannery O'Connor established herself as a singular voice in American literary tradition. Building on the Southern Gothic tradition exemplified by Faulkner while adding her own distinctive vision, O'Connor deliberately challenged the intellectual complacency of Northern progressives who embraced simplistic narratives of social and moral advancement. Her writing demonstrates crystalline prose combined with dark humor that exposes the contradictions underlying supposedly civilized Southern society. Using grotesque, often crude characters, O'Connor destabilized the assumed superiority and moral standing of the educated elite. Through vivid scenes of sudden violence and profound psychological disturbance, she rendered the American South during an era of violent racial upheaval; as racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow system fractured, O'Connor's work revealed the capacity for profound moral corruption. As contemporary society continues reckoning with the deep structures of American racism, O'Connor's fiction offers a valuable critical perspective on claims of moral progress and serves as a crucial literary record of a pivotal historical moment.

This seminar examines Flannery O'Connor's complete literary vision through her acclaimed short fiction, critical writings spanning her career, and her debut novel, Wise Blood. Together, we will analyze the sources, interpretations, and artistic strength of O'Connor's distinctive fiction. You will explore her intellectual influences derived from literature, theology, and religion, along with her engagement with the gothic literary tradition, her sophisticated use of regional dialect and ironic distance, and her polemical response to dominant ideologies of her era, including Cold War anticommunism, liberal progressivism, and existentialist philosophy. We will ground O'Connor's satirical perspective within the historical struggle over desegregation using biographical materials, historical documents, and critical essays by writers including Faulkner, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Hilton Als. Central questions will guide our inquiry: In critiquing liberal narratives of racial progress, did O'Connor provide deeper insight into the psychological delusions of white Southern identity, and to what degree did her work engage with Black cultural expressions and forms of resistance? Does O'Connor's vision suggest an essentially pessimistic understanding of the human condition, or do her narrative provocations suggest paths beyond the paralysis and terror that characterized both her historical moment and our own transitional era?