The Art And Vision Of Flannery O Connor

Flannery O'Connor believed that fiction must try to achieve something on the order of what St. Gregory wrote about Scripture: every time it presents a fact, it must also disclose a mystery. O'Connor's artistic vision was located squarely in her Catholic faith, yet she realized that to view life only through the eyes of the Church was to ignore a large part of existence. In her fiction, therefore, she explored a wider world, employing voices that challenged conceptions of both self and faith, ultimately enlarging and deepening both. In The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor, Robert Brinkmeyer presents an innovative study of O'Connor's fiction by exploring the dialogic forces at work in her writing.Drawing on the insights of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Brinkmeyer offers an explanation for the great depth and power of O'Connor's work, paying particular attention to the ways her art and audience bear upon her regnant Catholic vision. This pressure and resistance, Brinkmeyer writes, free O'Connor's vision from the limits of its perspective, opening it to growth and understanding. After a thorough discussion of the ways in which O'Connor's Catholic and southern heritage helped to form her artistic vision, Brinkmeyer shows how dialogic encounters are at work in O'Connor's interaction with her largely fundamentalist narrators, the stories they tell, and her readers. He focuses on several of her stories as well as her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. As the first analysis of the dialogical dynamics of O'Connor's art and vision, this study offers an original approach to understanding O'Connor. But the significance of the book extends far beyond O'Connor scholarship, for Brinkmeyer presents a critical method that has value for exploring other writers, particularly other modern Catholic writers.

During the 1950s and early 1960s Flannery O'Connor wrote more than a hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia. This full collection of these reviews nearly doubles the number that have appeared in print elsewhere and represents a significant body of primary materials from the O'Connor canon. We find in the reviews the same personality so vividly apparent in her fiction and her lectures--the unique voice of the artist that is one clear sign of genius. Her spare precision, her humor, her extraordinary ability to permit readers to see deeply into complex and obscure truths-all are present in these reviews and letters.

“I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs.” —Flannery O’Connor When she was young, the writer Flannery O’Connor was captivated by the chickens in her yard. She’d watch their wings flap, their beaks peck, and their eyes glint. At age six, her life was forever changed when she and a chicken she had been training to walk forwards and backwards were featured in the Pathé News, and she realized that people want to see what is odd and strange in life. But while she loved birds of all varieties and kept several species around the house, it was the peacocks that came to dominate her life. Written by Amy Alznauer with devotional attention to all things odd and illustrated in radiant paint by Ping Zhu, The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor explores the beginnings of one author’s lifelong obsession. Amy Alznauer lives in Chicago with her husband, two children, a dog, a parakeet, sometimes chicks, and a part-time fish, but, as of today, no elephants or peacocks. Ping Zhu is a freelance illustrator who has worked with clients big and small, won some awards based on the work she did for aforementioned clients, attracted new clients with shiny awards, and is hoping to maintain her livelihood in Brooklyn by repeating that cycle.

An integration of O'Connor's anthropology, her Catholic theological and philosophical beliefs, and her unique storyteller's art.

An essential book for critical study of the works of Flannery O'Connor. "The best study of one of the best writers"--Robert Fitzgerald