Hierarchy Overturned and the Last Shall March First “Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, coming through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary...
Where the Woods Gape Like a Dark Open Mouth and Pretense Falls Away “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” – The Misfit 🎧 Listen to Audio Here Historical and Literary Context A Good Man Is Hard to Find was first published in 1953 in the collection of the same name. O’Connor wrote it during the post-World War II era and the early Cold War period, a time of significant social change in America, and in the...
“I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare acknowledgment of a present, a nod in the crowd.” ~ Brideshead Revisited 🎧 Listen to audio here Understanding Charles Ryder’s Conversion in Brideshead Revisited When we read a great novel and later discuss it in class, we might leave with a sense of deep confusion...
“Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with...
“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” ~ From a letter O’Connor wrote to her friend “A” (Betty Hester) dated February 8, 1958, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. 🐦⬛ Before class, please invest in a careful read of the introduction in The Complete Stories. At the end of the post, I’ll include video links for a...
🎧 Audio Recording Here Finding Balance Between Modern Brevity & Classical Richness Keep it short The current push for brevity, what we might call the “Twitter-ization” of language, seems at odds with Waugh’s luxuriant descriptions and careful metaphoric constructions. Consider his famous “Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint” – a metaphor that doesn’t just describe but evokes an entire aesthetic and emotional world in a way that...
From Satire to Salvation: Exploring Waugh’s Masterwork of Catholic Transformation 🎧Audio Teaching Click Here Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) began his career writing satirical novels in the 1920s and 30s, including Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934). His early work was marked by a biting, cynical wit that skewered British upper classes and their hedonistic lifestyles. His conversion to Catholicism in 1930 significantly influenced his later works, particularly Brideshead...
Carney imagined beyond the façade; he was looking for something inside. Inside the brown stones have remained one family homes, or been cut up in individual apartments, and the rooms were marked by different choices in terms of furniture, paint, color, and what have been thrown on the walls, function. Then there were the invisible marks left by the lives within, those durable hauntings. ~ Harlem Shuffle 🎧Listen to the audio teaching here Handout link A Study in Transforming the Mundane into...
Time Jumps, Linked Stories, and the Art of Character Evolution 🎧Listen to Audio Teaching Here 🧐 Before getting started, ponder a couple questions: Considering Ray Carney’s progression, is this ultimately a tragedy plot? Examine the evidence for both this and other possible plot structures in the text. How does Whitehead’s technique of marking time through personal, political, and social details contribute to both character development and themes of transformation? Look for similar...
“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over,...
