Decoding Flannery O’Connor’s Carnival Writing From Bakhtin’s Carnival Poetics

Flannery O’Connor has been viewed as an original but fairly controversial writer in American literary circle. During her tragically short life, she left us a small oeuvre of two novels,31short stories and a series of essays and letters, which after all helped her gain a foothold in American literary history.O’Connor’s works are abundant in various marginalized grotesques and unexpected plot arrangement, like tricks, violence and death, and so on. This kind of carnivalistic writing, blending in horror and humor, has become the focus of O’Connor criticism for half a century. However, the previous researches did not pay enough attention to the relationship between O’Connor’s unique writing and the mainstream ideology of her times but confined her writing into the critics’context and horizon. Consequently, they failed to account for the inconsistence between the author’s lame declaration and bizarre texts.This thesis focuses on the similarity between O’Connor and Bakhtin in terms of their marginal identity and their preference for the grotesque and therefore applies Bakhtin’s carnival poetics to decode the carnival world created by O’Connor. With her keen observation and marvelous writing genius, O’Connor presented a free and open carnival world which was thronged with such carnival figures as tricksters, crowns, fools, decrowned kings and queens. This sort of carnivalistic life, out of its usual rut, was a bold challenge against the official world where people were separated and defined by impenetrable hierarchy, like social estate, rank, age, property, and so on.However, living in such extremely exclusive discourses as narcissism and elitism in the south, O’Connor was an absolute marginalized writer as a result of her insignificant upbringing, fatal disease and isolated life. She belonged to the minor discourse in the literary circle, lacking in enough capital to confront the dominant ideology. Therefore she made use of carnival writing to construct a carnival textual world marked by the spirit of subversion, dualism and dialogism, through which O’Connor subtly challenged the authenticity and authority of the southern myth.This thesis is composed of six parts. In Chapter One, the author briefly introduces Flannery O’Connor and her literary career and gives a panoramic view of O’Connor criticism aboard and at home and at last put forward her unique angle to analyze O’Connor’s writing. Chapter Two summarizes the major points in Bakhtin’s carnival poetics, laying a solid theoretic foundation for the whole thesis. As the trunk of this thesis, based on the intensive reading of O’Connor’s stories, Chapter Three and Chapter Four illustrate the carnival figures (tricksters, clowns, fools and decrowned kings and queens) and carnival spirit (the spirit of subversion, dualism and dialogism) in her writing. From these two parts, we can make out how O’Connor used the medium of humor, chaos, and other grotesque and violent elements, to subvert and liberate the assumptions made by the dominant discourses in the American south. The fifth part traces the reasons for O’Connor’s carnival writing from the comparatively new angles of discourse and identity. The last part is a comprehensive summary of the whole thesis.