Peculiar Crossroads

Peculiar Crossroads PDF Author: Farrell O'Gorman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807133354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In Peculiar Crossroads, Farrell O'Gorman explains how the radical religiosity of both Flannery O'Connor's and Walker Percy's vision made them so valuable as southern fiction writers and social critics. Via their spiritual and philosophical concerns, O'Gorman asserts, these two unabashedly Catholic authors bequeathed a postmodern South of shopping malls and interstates imbued with as much meaning as Appomattox or Yoknapatawpha. O'Gorman builds his argument with biographical, historical, literary, and theological evidence, examining the writers' work through intriguing pairings, such as O'Connor's Wise Blood with Percy's The Moviegoer, and O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find with Percy's Lancelot. An impeccable exercise in literary history and criticism, Peculiar Crossroads renders a genuine understanding of the Catholic sensibility of both O'Connor and Percy and their influence among contemporary southern writers.

Peculiar Crossroads

Peculiar Crossroads PDF Author: Farrell O'Gorman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807133354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Peculiar Crossroads, Farrell O'Gorman explains how the radical religiosity of both Flannery O'Connor's and Walker Percy's vision made them so valuable as southern fiction writers and social critics. Via their spiritual and philosophical concerns, O'Gorman asserts, these two unabashedly Catholic authors bequeathed a postmodern South of shopping malls and interstates imbued with as much meaning as Appomattox or Yoknapatawpha. O'Gorman builds his argument with biographical, historical, literary, and theological evidence, examining the writers' work through intriguing pairings, such as O'Connor's Wise Blood with Percy's The Moviegoer, and O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find with Percy's Lancelot. An impeccable exercise in literary history and criticism, Peculiar Crossroads renders a genuine understanding of the Catholic sensibility of both O'Connor and Percy and their influence among contemporary southern writers.

The Eternal Crossroads

The Eternal Crossroads PDF Author: Leon V. Driskell
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081318603X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Flannery O'Connor was a writer of extraordinary power and virtuosity. Her strong supple prose blends humor, pathos, satire, and grotesquerie which leads the reader to the evil at the center of the self's labyrinth. There, she confronts that evil with originality and power, pulling the reader into consideration of the terrifying dependencies of love in the recesses of the heart. This study focuses on Flannery O'Connor's sense of the coincidence of the eternal and cosmic with worldly time and place—"the eternal crossroads"— and how that sense controls and infuses her fiction. From an examination of various influences upon Miss O'Connor's work—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Mauriac, Nathaniel West, and Hawthorne—the authors consider her novels and stories, as well as several stories never collected. Their textual analysis shows that her structures, images, motifs, and symbols became vehicles for anagogical meaning as she progressed from early promise to artistic fulfillment. Considering Miss O'Connor's own comments on her writing, the authors illuminate some frequently misunderstood features of her work, such as her "grotesques" and her stress on death and violence. In so doing they make an important contribution to our understanding of how Flannery O'Connor arrived at "the eternal crossroads."

Stitchcraft

Stitchcraft PDF Author: Gayla Partridge
Publisher: Blue Star Press
ISBN: 1950968685
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Step inside the enchanted world of arcane imagery and rich esoteric symbolism in this deeply imaginative embroidery art book! Author Gayla Partridge draws upon her knowledge of vintage anatomical artwork, floral design, palmistry, Ouija, and oddities from the natural world to create magical, witchy twists on an age-old craft. Through extraordinary, stylized photography and detailed close-ups of designs, the embroidery art in Stitchcraft is entirely achievable with basic stitches and easy-to-follow instructions, enchanting beginners and expert crafters alike. Stitchcraft features: • 30 intricate embroidery designs, using a combination of nine basic stitches • Insights from the author on how she created each piece • 30 basic patterns to get you started embroidering your own version of her designs From the anatomy of a snake to floral skulls, from palmistry hands to botanical hearts, readers will be inspired to recreate Partridge’s spellbinding designs and to make them their own.

Startling Figures

Startling Figures PDF Author: Michael O'Connell
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 1531503489
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Startling Figures is about Catholic fiction in a secular age and the rhetorical strategies Catholic writers employ to reach a skeptical, indifferent, or even hostile audience. Although characters in contemporary Catholic fiction frequently struggle with doubt and fear, these works retain a belief in the possibility for transcendent meaning and value beyond the limits of the purely secular. Individual chapters include close readings of some of the best works of contemporary American Catholic fiction, which shed light on the narrative techniques that Catholic writers use to point their characters, and their readers, beyond the horizon of secularity and toward an idea of transcendence while also making connections between the widely acknowledged twentieth-century masters of the form and their twenty-first-century counterparts. This book is focused both on the aspects of craft that Catholic writers employ to shape the reader’s experience of the story and on the effect the story has on the reader. One recurring theme that is central to both is how often Catholic writers use narrative violence and other, similar disorienting techniques in order to unsettle the reader. These moments can leave both characters within the stories and the readers themselves shaken and unmoored, and this, O’Connell argues, is often a first step toward the recognition, and even possibly the acceptance, of grace. Individual chapters look at these themes in the works of Flannery O’Connor, J. F. Powers, Walker Percy, Tim Gautreaux, Alice McDermott, George Saunders, and Phil Klay and Kirstin Valdez Quade.

A Political Companion to Walker Percy

A Political Companion to Walker Percy PDF Author: Peter Augustine Lawler
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813141907
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In 1962, Walker Percy (1916--1990) made a dramatic entrance onto the American literary scene when he won the National Book Award for fiction with his first novel, The Moviegoer. A physician, philosopher, and devout Catholic, Percy dedicated his life to understanding the mixed and somewhat contradictory foundations of American life as a situation faced by the wandering and won-dering human soul. His controversial works combined existential questioning, scientific investigation, the insight of the southern stoic, and authentic religious faith to produce a singular view of humanity's place in the cosmos that ranks among the best American political thinking. An authoritative guide to the political thought of this celebrated yet complex American author, A Political Companion to Walker Percy includes seminal essays by Ralph C. Wood, Richard Reinsch II, and James V. Schall, S.J., as well as new analyses of Percy's view of Thomistic realism and his reaction to the American pursuit of happiness. Editors Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith have assembled scholars of diverse perspectives who provide a necessary lens for interpreting Percy's works. This comprehensive introduction to Percy's "American Thomism" is an indispensable resource for students of American literature, culture, and politics.

Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction

Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction PDF Author: Gary M. Ciuba
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807138630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction -- Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy -- expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic René Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned -- and sometimes ritually sanctified -- victimization of those deemed outcasts. Ciuba offers an impressively broad intellectual discussion that gives universal cultural meaning to the southern experience of desire, violence, and divinity with which these four authors wrestled and out of which they wrote. In a comprehensive analysis of Porter's semiautobiographical Miranda stories, Ciuba focuses on the prescribed role of women that Miranda imitates and ultimately escapes. O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away reveals three characters whose scandalous animosity caused by religious rivalry leads to the unbearable stumbling block of violence. McCarthy's protagonist in Child of God, Lester Ballard, appears as the culmination of a long tradition of the sacred violence of southern religion, twisted into his own bloody faith. And Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome brings Ciuba's discussion back to the victim, in Tom Moore's renunciation of a society in which scapegoating threatens to become the foundation of a new social regime. From nostalgia for the old order to visions of a utopian tomorrow, these authors have imagined the interrelationship of desire, antagonism, and religion throughout southern history. Ciuba's insights offer new ways of reading Porter, O'Connor, McCarthy, and Percy as well as their contemporaries who inhabited the same culture of violence -- violence desired, dreaded, denied, and deified.

Grounded

Grounded PDF Author: David Bischoff
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743421086
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
While answering a distress call from a scientific station in a remote part of the glaxy, the U.S.S. Enterprise™ becomes infected with a mysterious alien life form which feeds on and transforms inorganic materials. The Starship begins to gradually disintegrate, and Starfleet is forced to order its evacuation and destruction to prevent the dangerous infection form spreading throughout the galaxy. It's the end of an era for Captain Picard and his crew, who are scheduled for transfers that will split them up among different Starfleet vessels. But even as the end draws neear for the Starship Enterprise™, Captain Picard begins to formulate a desperate plan to save his ship and preserve his crew -- a plan that will force him to defy Starfleet orders and lead him to a connfrontation with a malevolent alien force -- which has the power to destroy the entire Federation.

Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist

Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist PDF Author: Richard Giannone
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611172276
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Title A compelling study of O'Connor's fiction as illuminated by the teaching of the desert monastics. "Lord, I'm glad I'm a hermit novelist," Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend in 1957. Sequestered by ill health, O'Connor spent the final thirteen years of her life on her isolated family farm in rural Georgia. During this productive time she developed a fascination with fourth-century Christians who retreated to the desert for spiritual replenishment and whose isolation, suffering, and faith mirrored her own. In Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist, Richard Giannone explores O'Connor's identification with these early Christian monastics and the ways in which she infused her fiction with their teachings. Surveying the influences of the desert fathers on O'Connor's protagonists, Giannone shows how her characters are moved toward a radical simplicity of ascetic discipline as a means of confronting both internal and worldly evils while being drawn closer to God. Artfully bridging literary analysis, O'Connor's biography, and monastic writings, Giannone's study explores O'Connor's advocacy of self-denial and self-scrutiny as vital spiritual weapons that might be brought to bear against the antagonistic forces she found rampant in modern American life.

Walker Percy's The Moviegoer at Fifty

Walker Percy's The Moviegoer at Fifty PDF Author: Jennifer Levasseur
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807162752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
More than fifty years after its publication, Walker Percy's National Book Award Winner, The Moviegoer, still confronts, comforts, and enlightens generations of readers. This collection of twelve new essays, edited and introduced by Jennifer Levasseur and Mary A. McCay, emphasize the evolving significance of this seminal, New Orleans novel. Authors' consider the text with diverse perspectives, drawing from philosophy, theology, disability theory, contemporary music and literature, social media, and film studies. Jay Tolson opens the volume with reflections on rereading the novel on a Kindle decades after writing his important biography of Percy. H. Collin Messer, Montserrat Gins, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and Brian Jobe follow with illuminating essays analyzing Percy's influences, from St. Augustine and Cervantes to Heidegger and Dostoevsky. Jonathan Potter and Read Mercer Schuchardt, Mary A. McCay, Matthew Luter, and Dorian Speed delve into the novel's significance to cinema, including an exhaustive guide to its film references, a meditation on Binx Bolling as a director of his existence, and the semiotics of celebrity. Brent Walter Cline and Robert Bolton, Michael Kobre, and L. Lamar Nisly present a roadmap for Bolling's inward journey, exploring a variety of elements from the role of the broken body to the spiritual connection to Bruce Springsteen lyrics. Walker Percy's The Moviegoer at Fifty is the first critical work devoted solely to the author's debut novel. Coinciding with the centenary of Percy's birth, this collection invites both new and veteran readers to enjoy The Moviegoer with fresh perspectives that underscore its lasting relevance.

Ex Auditu - Volume 28

Ex Auditu - Volume 28 PDF Author: Klyne Snodgrass
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498275303
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
CONTENTS: Introduction Klyne Snodgrass Finding Happiness in Family Life: Biblical Reflections Stephen C. Barton Response to Barton Luke A. Powery Imposter Happiness or the Real Thing? Marriage, Singleness, and the Beatitudes in the Twenty-First Century Jana Marguerite Bennett Response to Bennett Jo Ann Deasy Jesus, Paul, and Family Values Julie Hanlon Rubio Response to Rubio Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom Tyranny, Authority, Service: Leadership and Headship in the New Testament Lynn H. Cohick Response to Cohick Dennis R. Edwards Revenge, Forgiveness, and Sibling Rivalry: A Theological Dialogue Between Scripture and Science Dennis Olson Response to Olson Jack R. Lundbom Wives and Daughters: Women, Sex, and Violence in Biblical Tradition Caryn A. Reeder Response to Reeder Christopher B. Ansberry Generativity, Covenant Witness, and Jesus' Final Discourse Jim Dekker Response to Dekker Linda Cannell The Use of Scripture in Catholic Social Teaching's Vision of the Family Mary Veeneman Response to Veeneman Erica Olson-Bang Family Worship (Isaiah 58:1-12) Luke A. Powery Annotated Bibliography on Family