The Violent Bear It Away: Flannery O'Connor's Savage Vision of Grace

"Trudging into the distance in the bleeding, stinking mad shadow of Jesus ... the Lord out of dust had created him, had made him blood and nerve and mind, had made him to bleed and weep and think, and set him in a world of loss and fire." Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away.

Considered one of America's greatest writers of fiction, Flannery O'Connor wrote bold and shocking stories that resisted conventional description. A devout Roman Catholic who lived in the "Christ-Haunted" Protestant South, O'Connor's stories are strange, darkly humorous, and often violent. But the violence itself is never gratuitous, rather it serves as a wake-up call for her somnambulant characters. O'Connor states, "In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work." In this course we will read and discuss O'Connor's final novel, The Violent Bear It Away, as well as a number of her greatest short stories.