| This project concerns the work of Flannery O'Connor and the predominant critical interpretations of her text. With few but important exceptions, the scholastic interpretation of O'Connor's work is collectively classified and discussed as a transparent but shocking attempt to disturb her readers back to the foundational beliefs of Catholicism. My treatment does not necessarily completely disagree with this assessment. However the traditional scholarly mode is woefully lacking an appreciation for the variegated and more complex levels of her structure and aim, in terms of the narrative devices utilized and interwoven, and in an elucidation of the individual reader's own role in unconsciously creating a framework for anagogical experience.;O'Connor redefines the notion of secular. What I will call the "neo-secular," and what O'Connor metaphorically connotes with her ubiquitous term "the city," is not distinguished by its more traditional classifications as non-believers or even non-denominationalists, but instead by its apparently different, but actually mirroring manifestations of an unchecked consumption and reproduction of the values and ideas of the mainstream narrative. The neo-secular narrative is necessarily vested in the slow, but constant removal of an appreciation of unknowable mystery as a crucial element of human experience.;Delineation and description of the functional mechanisms of O'Connor's art are provided to better understand her moral aesthetic. The reader holds the interpretative key to the canonized author's normally rigidly construed texts, it is the reader's unconscious determinations of O'Connor's countless ambiguities that combine to form the instrument with which O'Connor can return this reader to a drive for self-knowledge and conscious experience with the limits of our certainties. |
