Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 2.03 Literature
Presentation #1 Title
Flannery O’Connor, Hillbilly Novelist
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Flannery O'Connor's use of Appalachian stereotypes situates her fiction in the realm of the mythical and mysterious. Flannery O’Connor joked that she was not “a hillbilly nihilist” but rather “a hillbilly Thomist.” Critics and scholars since have focused on her philosophical terms, at the expense of considering another, equally important, ideological sign in her parallel formulations. While much attention has deservedly been focused on O’Connor’s powerful albeit quirky theology, little attention has been paid the role of the hillbilly stereotype in her writing. This paper examines the slur hillbilly as it appears in her fiction and letters, both as self-mocking identification with the likes of Erskine Caldwell (a supposed kinship that mocks non-southern critics’ and readers’ attempts to portray all writers from the region in the same light) and, more important, as a means of setting fictions (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Artificial Nigger,” The Violent Bear It Away) in an ideology-inflected region she professed understanding. While it may seem that this presentation will criticize O’Connor for writing neo-Local Color fiction, the opposite is in fact true. O’Connor’s own aesthetic precepts on topics like the Grotesque and the “blight” cast over fiction by an unwavering fixation on verisimilitude at the expense of mystery are well defined in both her non-fiction and her fiction and offer, as C. Hugh Holman wrote nearly forty years ago, a way to widen the narrow field of vision offered by orthodox approaches to Appalachian literature—a widening best expressed in such followers of O’Connor as Cormac McCarthy and Ron Rash.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Jimmy Dean Smith is Professor and Chair of English at Union College in Barbourville, KY. He has published on, among other subjects, John Fox, Jr., Loretta Lynn, John Sayles's Matewan and Deliverance, and Ron Rash, and is currently working on a book chapter about reality tv and Appalachia.
Flannery O’Connor, Hillbilly Novelist
Flannery O'Connor's use of Appalachian stereotypes situates her fiction in the realm of the mythical and mysterious. Flannery O’Connor joked that she was not “a hillbilly nihilist” but rather “a hillbilly Thomist.” Critics and scholars since have focused on her philosophical terms, at the expense of considering another, equally important, ideological sign in her parallel formulations. While much attention has deservedly been focused on O’Connor’s powerful albeit quirky theology, little attention has been paid the role of the hillbilly stereotype in her writing. This paper examines the slur hillbilly as it appears in her fiction and letters, both as self-mocking identification with the likes of Erskine Caldwell (a supposed kinship that mocks non-southern critics’ and readers’ attempts to portray all writers from the region in the same light) and, more important, as a means of setting fictions (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Artificial Nigger,” The Violent Bear It Away) in an ideology-inflected region she professed understanding. While it may seem that this presentation will criticize O’Connor for writing neo-Local Color fiction, the opposite is in fact true. O’Connor’s own aesthetic precepts on topics like the Grotesque and the “blight” cast over fiction by an unwavering fixation on verisimilitude at the expense of mystery are well defined in both her non-fiction and her fiction and offer, as C. Hugh Holman wrote nearly forty years ago, a way to widen the narrow field of vision offered by orthodox approaches to Appalachian literature—a widening best expressed in such followers of O’Connor as Cormac McCarthy and Ron Rash.
