Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 2.03 Literature
Presentation #1 Title
The Christ-Abandoned Landscape of Nothing Gold Can Stay
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Preface: This presentation will examine the ways in which Ron Rash's Nothing Gold Can Stay pays tribute to Flannery O'Connor's short fiction while withholding an endorsement of her Christian vision. Abstract: Flannery O’Connor is perhaps best remembered for her frequent use of violence to awaken her characters to their spiritual desolation. As a devout Roman Catholic struggling to communicate with an audience she perceived to be increasingly secular, O’Connor hoped the bizarre elements in her fiction would awaken readers to the need they share with her characters for spiritual deliverance. She discusses this intention in “The Fiction Writer and His Country”: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures” (Mystery and Manners 33-4). The “beliefs” to which O’Connor refers include both the recognition of sin and the possibility of deliverance from that sin through Christ. Ron Rash, also writing in the South O’Connor famously described as “Christ-haunted,” employs violence similarly to stun his characters into awareness of sin. Payment for sin is still necessary, Rash suggests in Nothing Gold Can Stay, but it comes only in the substitutionary atonement other mortals provide, either willingly (as in “Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven” and “The Dowry”) or unwillingly (as in “Where the Map Ends”). In either kind of atonement, Christ is conspicuously absent.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Martha Greene Eads professor of English at Eastern Mennonite University, grew up in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge mountains and studied literature and theology at Wake Forest University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Durham (UK). Her research and teaching interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century drama, English modernism, and contemporary Southern fiction, and her articles on those topics have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Christianity and Literature, The Cresset, Modern Drama, The Southern Quarterly, and Theology.
The Christ-Abandoned Landscape of Nothing Gold Can Stay
Preface: This presentation will examine the ways in which Ron Rash's Nothing Gold Can Stay pays tribute to Flannery O'Connor's short fiction while withholding an endorsement of her Christian vision. Abstract: Flannery O’Connor is perhaps best remembered for her frequent use of violence to awaken her characters to their spiritual desolation. As a devout Roman Catholic struggling to communicate with an audience she perceived to be increasingly secular, O’Connor hoped the bizarre elements in her fiction would awaken readers to the need they share with her characters for spiritual deliverance. She discusses this intention in “The Fiction Writer and His Country”: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures” (Mystery and Manners 33-4). The “beliefs” to which O’Connor refers include both the recognition of sin and the possibility of deliverance from that sin through Christ. Ron Rash, also writing in the South O’Connor famously described as “Christ-haunted,” employs violence similarly to stun his characters into awareness of sin. Payment for sin is still necessary, Rash suggests in Nothing Gold Can Stay, but it comes only in the substitutionary atonement other mortals provide, either willingly (as in “Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven” and “The Dowry”) or unwillingly (as in “Where the Map Ends”). In either kind of atonement, Christ is conspicuously absent.
