Hillbilly Thomist Flannery O'Connor, St. Thomas and the Limits of Art
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
The late Marion Montgomery was professor emeritus of English at the University of Georgia. In 2003, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute honored Montgomery with the Gerhart Niemeyer Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship in Liberal Arts. He lived in Crawford, Georgia.“engaging...readers...will be rewarded in reading [Montgomery]”—<i>Modern Age</i>; “a monumental book”—<i>The Charlotte World</i>; “massive work”—<i>First Things</i>; “I regard Marion Montgomery as one of the most acute and profound critics of present-day American culture. He brings to his discussion of it penetrating insight and solid scholarship.”—Cleanth Brooks.
In the spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas, the writings of Flannery O'Connor's concern for place can best be seen in the immediacies of things and persons. It is in relation to St. Thomas' teaching, then, that O'Connor becomes comfortable in her "place," Andalusia, that small farm just outside the small town of Milledgeville in middle Georgia. The abiding relationship between place--Andalusia or elsewhere--and a person comes out of human nature itself, evidenced in a person's experiences of things in this place at this time.
With that as background, this detailed analysis of O'Connor's works lays to rest the author's own self-deprecating description of herself as a "hillbilly" Thomist. Instead we see in O'Connor's writing a highly sophisticated mind, an inconvenience to the many critics who dismiss her as anti-intellectual.
Volume 1
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. Settling In at Andalusia
2. In Company with Good Country People
3. Glimpsing a Peacock’s Underwear
4. From Lethe to the Mississippi: Shall We Gather at the River?
5. Sorting Truth at the Surface of Things
6. At Risk in the Wilderness of Theory
7. Out of Essential Displacement, Toward a Felt Balance
8. Miss Flannery in Cahoots with the Devil
9. Coincidence of the Moral and Dramatic Senses
10. The Intellectual Air We Breathe in Skating the Surfaces
11. The Cannibal of Thought: Modernist Theory
12. Getting Dusty, Even Muddy, in the Swamp of the Self
13. Moral and Dramatic Problematics of Metaphor
Volume 2
14. The Poet and His Implied Attitude
15. Writing about the Whole World: The Challenge of the Local to Reason in Making
16. Reason Seeking Answering Reason in Things: The Philosopher as Poet, the Poet as Philosopher
17. Connecting Two Points—Two Countries—with Images
18. Uncertain Images, Entangling Metaphors: The Long Pursuit of Meaning
19. The Sentimentality of Being Half in Love with Easeful Death
20. The Mystery of Form: Discovering the Word in Our Words
21. Homo Viator on the Threshold of the Far Country: Here, Now, Always
22. His Presence in Things, Our Fingerprints on Words
23. Our Pursuit of Nothingness, Artifice as Idol
Afterword
Appendix A: Eric Voegelin and Flannery O’Connor on the Disjunction of Grace and Nature
Appendix B: Concerning Thomistic Epistemology
Appendix C: Concerning Thomas’ “Principle of Proper Proportionality”
Appendix D: Concerning O’Connor’s Fictional Strategy of Indirection
Appendix E: Concerning the Artist and Prudential Humility
Chapter Notes [for both volumes]
Selected Bibliography
Index