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by Flannery O'Connor

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Flannery O'Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard. Isolated by poor health and consumed by her fervent Catholic faith, O'Connor created works of moral fiction that, according to Oates, "were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside the characters' minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means."

In imagining those events of irreversible magnitude, O'Connor could sometimes seem outlandish--even cartoonish--but she strongly rejected the notion that her perceptions of 20th century life were distorted. "Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable," O'Connor said. "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."

In April of 1959--five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus--O'Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. She read one of her most famous and unsettling stories, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The audio, accessible above, is one of two known recordings of the author reading that story. (The other, from a 1957 appearance at Notre Dame University, can be heard here.) In her distinctive Georgian drawl, O'Connor tells the story of a fateful family trip:

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."

To continue reading the full text while you listen, open this page in a new window. And afterward, you can follow this link to a recording of O'Connor reading her 1960 essay, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," in which she writes: "I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."

You will find O'Connor's reading of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" housed in our collection of Free Audio Books.
Related Content: Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here's a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com , you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here

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Flannery O'Connor Reads 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' in Rare 1959 Audio

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Flannery O'Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard.

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This is a short video lesson on theme. Please watch the video, take a few notes and take the quiz that follows.

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Defining a Theme

The theme in a story is its underlying message, or 'big idea.' In other words, what critical belief about life is the author trying to convey in the writing of a novel, play, short story or poem? This belief, or idea, transcends cultural barriers. It is usually universal in nature. When a theme is universal, it touches on the human experience, regardless of race or language. It is what the story means. Often, a piece of writing will have more than one theme.

Think about some T.V. sitcoms you have seen that you have found trite and boring. Was there a significant problem in the T.V. show that needed to be solved? Probably not. In much the same way, if a piece of writing doesn't have deeper meaning than we can just see on the surface, it is just as shallow as the T.V. sitcom. In order for writing to be meaningful and lasting, it needs to have a theme.

How Does a Writer Develop Theme?

So how does a writer develop a theme for a story, poem or narrative? It really comes down to what the writer believes about life. If a writer has a belief system or feels strongly about certain things - and most people do - then, those strong life views will be reflected in his or her writing. For a work to last, it needs depth, and depth in writing reflects depth in the writer.

Examples

We could go on and on with great examples of theme, but we won't - I promise. Let's just look at three examples and analyze what gives depth and meaning to these pieces of literature.

Take Golding's The Lord of the Flies, for example. We know that Golding taught in a boys' school and later fought in WWII. He writes, 'I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.' In The Lord of the Flies, Golding took his belief about evil being resident in the human heart, even in children, and set about to prove this by placing young boys on a deserted island. If they were good at heart and only corrupted by their environment, then the boys would be well-behaved. But, if they were bent toward evil, the result would be chaos. Chaos wins. Thus, a deeper meaning in The Lord of the Flies would be that man is capable of evil and that evil dwells in the human heart. Whether or not the reader agrees with Golding's analysis, this novel will most likely always be considered an enduring classic because of its depth of meaning.

In Julio Noboa's poem 'Identity', we see an entirely different theme. Let's read the poem, first:

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what is theme in literature? - definition & examples - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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What is Theme in Literature? - Definition & Examples - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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The theme in a story is its underlying message, or 'big idea.' In other words, what critical belief about life is the author trying to convey in the writing of a novel, play, short story or poem? This belief, or idea, transcends cultural barriers. It is usually universal in nature.

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Point of View and Characterization WKST for "Why Don't You Dance?"

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Point of View and Characterization WKST for "Why Don't You Dance?"

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by Raymond Carver

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This is a video lesson on understanding characterization in short stories. Please watch the video and take notes during the first 10-14 minutes of class.

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Two Stories to Think About Point of View

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Two Stories to Think About Point of View

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by Ernest Hemingway

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by Ernest Hemingway

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Please read "The Flowers" by Maya Angelou and create a plot diagram using events from the story

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Please read "The Flowers" by Maya Angelou and create a plot diagram using events from the story

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Due in class Thursday, October 8, 2015

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by Maya Angelou

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"The Flowers" by Alice Walker

Reading and Writing about Short Fiction. Ed. Edward Proffitt. NY: Harcourt,
1988. 404-05.

It seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from hen house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these. The air held a keenness that made her nose twitch. The harvesting of the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash, made each day a golden surprise that caused excited little tremors to run up her jaws.

Myop carried a short, knobby stick. She struck out at random at chickens she liked, and worked out the beat of a song on the fence around the pigpen. She felt light and good in the warm sun. She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat-de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment,

Turning her back on the rusty boards of her family's sharecropper cabin, Myop walked along the fence till it ran into the stream made by the spring. Around the spring, where the family got drinking water, silver ferns and wildflowers grew. Along the shallow banks pigs rooted. Myop watched the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and the water that silently rose and slid away down the stream.

She had explored the woods behind the house many times. Often, in late autumn, her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves. Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes. She found, in addition to various common but pretty ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweet suds bush full of the brown, fragrant buds.

By twelve o'clock, her arms laden with sprigs of her findings, she was a mile or more from home. She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts. It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself. The air was damp, the silence close and deep.

Myop began to circle back to the house, back to the peacefulness of the morning. It was then she stepped smack into his eyes. Her heel became lodged in the broken ridge between brow and nose, and she reached down quickly, unafraid, to free herself. It was only when she saw his naked grin that she gave a little yelp of surprise.

He had been a tall man. From feet to neck covered a long space. His head lay beside him. When she pushed back the leaves and layers of earth and debris Myop saw that he'd had large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken, long fingers, and very big bones. All his clothes had rotted away except some threads of blue denim from his overalls. The buckles of the overall had turned green.

Myop gazed around the spot with interest. Very near where she'd stepped into the head was a wild pink rose. As she picked it to add to her bundle she noticed a raised mound, a ring, around the rose's root. It was the rotted remains of a noose, a bit of shredding plowline, now blending benignly into the soil. Around an overhanging limb of a great spreading oak clung another piece. Frayed, rotted, bleached, and frazzled-barely there-but spinning restlessly in the breeze. Myop laid down her flowers.

And the summer was over.

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"The Flowers" by Alice Walker Reading and Writing about Short Fiction. Ed. Edward Proffitt. NY: Harcourt, 1988. 404-05. It seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from hen house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these. The air held a keenness that made her nose twitch.

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This is a video lesson on understanding narrative point of view. Please watch the video before class on Tuesday, October 13, 2015

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Use this document to review Freytag's Pyramid and to create your own Plot Diagrams.

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This is a video lesson on understanding the plot using The Lion King. Please watch before class on Tuesday, October 6, 2015.

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Learning Plot Structure with The Lion King

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This is a lesson on understanding the setting using various movies, including The Lord of the Rings and Jurassic Park. Please watch before class on Monday, October 19, 2015