Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants

Title

'Crazy 'bout Ya, Baby?' Eros, Abjection, and Flannery O'Connor's Dangerous Lovers

Department

English Department

College

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Date Range

2012-2013

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities

Abstract

This essay opens by showing eros at work in the life of the grandmother protagonist in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, which involves explicating her son, Baily; the café owner and WWII veteran, Red Sammy Butts; and the escaped psychotic felon, the Misfit, as stand-ins for that primary-relationship figure that she failed to find in Bailey father and wistfully imagines in E. A. Teagarden, that suitor of her youth who was successfully in worldly terms but who was also the one that got away. Then the analysis takes up theological and secular readings of this story and the grandmother contrasted portrayal, according to which lens is used. The essay then defines Julia Kristeva notion of abjection in Tales of Love and indicates ways in which the contrasted readings of A Good Man can be integrated into a fuller and thereby less polarized means of interpreting this signature story by one of America most renown short story writers. This moves also attempts to show the thirst for a God-centered view of reality in a seemingly postmodern critic: Julia Kristeva.

Conference Name

American Literature Association

Conference Location

Boston, MA

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