Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1972, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1968, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 1989, English

Flannery O'Connor was not an author who was afraid to take drastic measures, or to be on familiar terms with a deep mystery. She, like the great mathematicians, had points she wanted to connect,. and was willing to tear her fabric to connect them. In her fiction, the disruption she uses to forge her paths has many incarnations. The generating forces of that disruption, and the forces generated by that disruption, can be focused into three immediately identifiable categories: comedy, violence, and the grotesque. In order to better understand O'Connor's fiction and the connections between the taxed analogy of complex numbers, her writing, and her philosophy, these three topics will be dealt with one at a time; though examples from all of her short fiction will be supplied, the discussion will pivot on three stories more or less spanning O'Connor's short-fiction canon: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (1952), "Greenleaf" (1956), and "The Lame Shall Enter First" (1962).

Committee: (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 1990, English

Aside from the fact that most of Flannery O'Connor's works are set in the South where she lived nearly her entire life, her idiosyncratic characters and the consistently horrifying fates that they meet could not seem further removed from the widely accepted image of the author herself.l This image, instigated by her loved ones and perpetuated by critics, is of a witty, intelligent, and above all else devout Catholic who was stoic in the face of a crippling disease that cut her life short. Despite the limits placed upon her by illness. O'Connor is described as having been socially receptive while living a fairly retired life with her beloved mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, on their dairy farm where she raised scores of peacocks and other fowl as a hobby. The main determinant of O'Connor's literary personality and the most influential force affecting her writing has almost universally been acknowledged to be her staunch Catholicism. Much criticism of O'Connor's work reinforces this notion to such a degree that one might infer any study not dealing with O'Connor's Christian perspective to be inherently lacking.

Committee: Robert Longsworth (Advisor) Subjects: Literature