Search Results

Chapter 3 focuses on Balthasar's theological aesthetics as a well‐articulated critical methodology. Balthasar's fusion of aesthetics with history forges both a Christology and an analogy of being that is developed in light of that Christology. Balthasar urges us to “see the form [of Christ]” in all manner of being and experience—human activities, natural phenomena, and especially human works of art. “Seeing the form” becomes a central critical and theological hermeneutic; and the chapter cultivates a parallel between “seeing the form” and interpreting, broadly, the “word(s)” of narrative art. The first three sections of the chapter develop an aesthetics of a representative word (in this case, the term “hierarchy”); the last section is an application of what is gleaned from the first three upon Flannery O'Connor's “Revelation.” While a close reading of O'Connor's text serves as a literary exemplum of a Catholic imagination, other poets and authors who demonstrate a similar theological aesthetic are considered in order round out the discussion.

Carol Shloss takes a literal approach to the subject of legacy by exploring and questioning the legal nature of Flannery O’Connor’s literary estate, a hot topic among many O’Connor scholars. Using “A Circle in the Fire” as a structural metaphor, Shloss argues that the disputes over ownership and property that are present in O’Connor’s fiction echo the reality of Flannery O’Connor’s personal literary estate. Shloss draws on extensive archival research in order to trace the history of O’Connor’s literary estate since the author’s death, while exploring the meaning of property in O’Connor’s work and positing how O’Connor’s writing itself becomes a type of property. Following the succession of O’Connor’s literary executors, Shloss identifies a tendency to move away from creativity about O’Connor and toward an enshirement of her image by a small number of people. Shloss argues that in the end, relaxing the copyright restrictions on O’Connor’s archive would best carry out the wishes of the author. 

This chapter provides an overview of the responses to Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of the reception history, and argues for the need to recover the breadth of interpretation her work invites. The writers discuss the concept of authorial intent as it relates to O’Connor and lay out their premise that author, text, and audience all play roles in the process of meaning making. The authors also provide chapter summaries for each of the essays included in the volume.

This chapter compares the Catholic nostalgia in the works of James Joyce and American author Flannery O'Connor. It explains that though O'Connor once boasted of having a Catholic background and inclinations, her fiction does not exude Catholicism as does Joyce's. It also suggests that O'Connor's works are decidedly contrary to the Catholic philosophy of love, mercy, and forgiveness and that she typically does not overtly refer to Catholic dogma and ritual as Joyce does. It also discusses her penchant for designing violent epiphanies through which her characters are spiritually enlightened at the point of death.

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.

This chapter examines Kirk’s friendships with Robert Nisbet, Leo Strauss, Flannery O’Connor, Eric Voegelin, and Ray Bradbury. It also tells the disastrous story of Kirk’s creation and editing of a nonideological journal of thought and scholarship, Modern Age, only to be thwarted by bigotry and editorial disagreements with the publisher.

Flannery O’Connor identified logical positivism with atheism and nihilism in its denial of objective status to moral values or religious beliefs. Yet to read her work as a straightforward exercise in Christian apologetics is to miss the ways that her aesthetic strategy flirts with the very positivism and nihilism that it seeks to combat. O’Connor’s references to logical positivism and the fact/value problem conform to a larger “crisis of belief” in post-1945 fiction, represented in works by Allen Tate, Wallace Stevens, Mary McCarthy, Ronald Sukenick, Philip Roth, Iris Murdoch, Walker Percy, and John Updike. What O’Connor describes as the “negative appearance” of her work results from her refusal to represent a positivist aesthetic or religious view of the world. O’Connor’s aesthetic strategy focuses the readers attention on what is there in order to represent what is not; her aesthetic negativism insists, with Wittgenstien, that what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Bruce Gentry, the editor of Flannery O’Connor Review, reflects on the state of O’Connor studies. He shares the story of why and how the National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes on O’Connor came about, reviews a few of the struggles and successes, and shares a few thoughts about the future of O’Connor scholarship. He argues that while he no longer thinks we will ever fully figure out O’Connor as a Catholic writer, he believes O’Connor wanted to be taken seriously, first and foremost, as a writer, and, therefore, he has defined his mission as working to expand O’Connor studies beyond the southern and beyond the Catholic. He then discusses O’Connor’s broad appeal in disciplines beyond English. He celebrates the increasing diversity in approaches to her work and anticipates that the trend will continue as we find new answers to old questions and answers to brand new questions too.

Eric Bennett examines O’Connor’s legacy in an influential but often overlooked venue: the creative writing workshop. Bennett argues that creative writing programs have benefitted from O’Connor’s success story, but they have also mischaracterized her method as a writer. Bennett demonstrates how manuals and instruction in creative writing laud the practice of not knowing where one’s fiction is going during the writing process, and often some of O’Connor’s words get marshaled in support of this approach. Bennett claims that such uses of O’Connor both distort who she was and demonstrate how impoverished current theories of fiction often are.

The chapter serves both as a brief biography of Balthasar and a protracted bibliography of his work. The consideration of Balthasar's monumental opus (The Glory of the Lord, Theo‐drama, and Theo‐logic) provides a critical “system” in which to read texts and begins to illustrate Balthasar's unique contribution to current discussions about the intersection between theology, history, philosophy, and narrative art. The chapter demonstrates that not only is Balthasar one of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, but also his work has practical contributions to make to discourses in critical theory. Like critical theory, Balthasar's work is theological, literary, anthropological, philosophical, psychological, political, and historical, which are critical theory's main components. In the spirit of the ressourcement theology that shaped him, Balthasar is primarily interested in renewing attention to older sources in order to critique the idealistic excesses of modernity. In this sense, Balthasar reveals a postmodern temperament: he too is concerned with issues of language and difference, with aporia, with plurality, with surplus, and with horizons of meaning, to name a few. The difference between Balthasar and the majority of critical theorists resides in ontological and theological orientation: it is therefore a difference of imagination and of grammar. The chapter elaborates on these and other dynamic relationships.

In addition to laying out a general groundwork for the Catholic imagination as a critical lens—and suggesting a variety of ways that the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar aids critics in articulating such a theological vision—the chapter also attempts to locate the particular phenomena of postmodernism and deconstruction within the intersection of theology and narrative art. Balthasar anticipates the tendency of current critical theory to privilege and emphasize the amorphous breadth of both linguistic and cultural expression; and he anticipates the critical tension between those who read Catholicism as theological truth and those that might read Catholicism as a “fluctuating signifier,” as a cultural and/or literary text. Under this general theme, a dialog is opened with such diverse critics as William Lynch, Paul Giles, Michel De Certeau, and Jacques Derrida. Like them, Balthasar's theology plots a route for appreciating the aesthetic complexity and theological possibility of a broadly canvassed intertextuality and interdisciplinarity. However, Balthasar's program also defends the critical uniqueness of certain theological commitments (e.g., the transcendentals, the Incarnation, and the trinitarian structure of being) and looks to the arts to demonstrate the formal expression and aesthetic span of these phenomena. The chapter concludes with the proposition that it is the recognition of these essential questions that both challenge and aid the articulation of a Catholic imagination and that a turn to representative work in literature, poetry, and film will aid in such an articulation.

"We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words,” wrote Walter Ong, "Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying?” The historical connection between photographic aesthetics and non-syntactical communications forms the backbone of this chapter, which shows how institutions of photojournalism helped Americans cultivate a practice of “sight reading”: using visual cues to activate a sense of ethnographic knowledge that was explicitly opposed to literary interpretation. A prime example is the National Geographic magazine, whose editors and photographers enjoyed intimate organizational and technological relationships with the military-scientific industry in the US. By arranging photographs and texts to simulate for readers the experience of virtual communication, the magazine’s sight reading practices offer a necessary context to understand the literary writings of spies-turned-editors, such as Beverley Bowie (Operation Bughouse), Ilia Tolstoy, and Curtis LeMay. They also reveal how more critical subscribers—Flannery O’Connor (The Displaced Person), Elizabeth Bishop (Questions of Travel), and Walter Abish (Alphabetical Africa)—crafted fiction that questioned the experience of sight as a source of cultural knowledge. For subscribers and spies alike, the imagination of knowing others is deeply bound to the practice of sight reading.

This chapter examines the influence of Vatican II on the works of American writer Mary Gordon. It states that Gordon was influenced by pre-Vatican II writer Flannery O'Connor and that she did not diverge from the path taken by O'Connor on the issue regarding the Catholic Church. Though Gordon shares O'Connor's purpose and methodological incongruity, her terms are different for she writes almost exclusively about Catholics. Vatican II has made it possible for Gordon to use Catholicism both as the subject she hopes to illuminate and as the light she uses to bring out its features.

Chapter 5 presents a reading of David Lodge's novel Therapy (1995) in light of Balthasar's Theo‐logic. Lodge does well to illustrate that the erasure of God that preoccupies postmodern consciousness significantly affects contemporary conceptions about “subject formation” and “people in relation.” Lodge develops these themes by constructing a narrative that mirrors both the theological trajectory of Balthasar's tripartite program and the existential progression identified by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard—namely, the aesthetic, ethical, and religious “stages” of human experience. Importantly, a close consideration of Kierkegaard's stages reveals a direct analogy with the transcendentals, which, in turn, illuminates one of the many reasons why Balthasar admired Kierkegaard and why Lodge's novel is a fertile literary example of Balthasar's Theologic. By a close consideration of the triadic structure of being presented by a variety of sources, the chapter begins to discern how God's logic—how human logic—exists in a trinitarian dynamic.

Michael Bliss’s essay explores the mythic and Christian aspects of The Wild Bunch, paying particular attention to what he considers its key sequences: the scenes in Angel’s village and those that follow the shootout there. Drawing on the criticism of Northrop Frye and Flannery O’Connor, Bliss argues that in light of the film’s use of violence as a metaphor as well as its radically conceived multiple endings, which result in the Bunch being first apotheosized and then absorbed into nature, The Wild Bunch qualifies as a religious work of art.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the influence of Catholic nostalgia on the works of Irish author James Joyce. This book identifies the specific Catholic rituals and devotions that caused a nostalgic reaction in Joyce and suggests that his depiction of Catholic issues in his work has inspired in his readers an enduring admiration for institutional Catholicism. It also explores the influence of Joyce on subsequent writers, including Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton.

What are some hallmarks of Catholic vision that might allow readers to identify a Catholic imagination at work when they encounter one? Is it possible to identify lines of continuity among writers whose work is original and entirely unique to that person? And, finally, in what way can seeing—and representing—the world Catholicly bear the stamp of truth for non-Catholics as well as Catholics? This chapter deals with sacramental qualities and themes found among poets and novelists whose works constitute a kind of canon of the Catholic literary imagination. From the nineteenth-century English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins to the mid-twentieth-century French novelist Georges Bernanos and American writer Flannery O'Connor, the chapter examines a spiritual aesthetic best conveyed perhaps in the words of a character dying young in Bernanos's celebrated novel The Diary of a Country Priest. The chapter is particularly attuned to the subtle interplay of language and spirit.