"Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor"

NEH Summer Institute at GCSU, July 2007

Evening Events Free and Open to the Public

All events are to be held in the Arts & Sciences Auditorium, GCSU, and all events begin at 8 p.m.

Tuesday, July 3:   Film version of Wise Blood , with discussion led by Marshall Bruce Gentry

Thursday, July 5:   Film version of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and film interview Galleyproof , with discussion led by John D. Cox

Friday, July 6:   Reading by Martin Lammon, Director of MFA-Creative Writing Program at GCSU

Monday, July 9:   Lecture by Prof. Patricia Yaeger, University of Michigan: "Flannery O'Connor and John Wayne." This lecture addresses gender issues in 1950s America and how O'Connor reacted to her culture's definitions of feminine and masculine roles.

Tuesday, July 10 :   Film version of "A Circle in the Fire" and film version of "The River," with discussion led by John D. Cox

Wednesday, July 11:   Lecture by Prof. Virginia Wray, Lyon College: "The Importance of What Flannery Didn't Say." This lecture discusses how the manuscripts of O'Connor's unfinished third novel ( Why Do the Heathen Rage? ) reflect O'Connor's changing attitude on race and social issues.

Thursday, July 12:   Reading by Renee Dodd and Allen Gee, GCSU Faculty in Creative Writing Program

Monday, July 16:   Lecture by Prof. Michael Kreyling, Vanderbilt University: "Flannery O'Connor and the Art of Believing: Caroline Gordon, Jacques Maritain, and Teilhard de Chardin." This talk about O'Connor's engagement with important thinkers explores the intersections of O'Connor's southern cultural beliefs and her Catholic beliefs.

Tuesday, July 17:   Film version of "The Comforts of Home" and film version of "Good Country People," with discussion led by Marshall Bruce Gentry

Wednesday, July 18:   Lecture by Prof. Richard Giannone, Fordham University: "Dark Night, Dark Faith." This talk examines how O'Connor found and maintained certainty in spite of the fundamental uncertainty that characterizes our period, in religion and other realms of life. The subject is more of a quandary when one considers that O'Connor writes about outsiders of an improbable sort.

Thursday, July 19:   Reading by Laura Newbern and Alice Friman, GCSU faculty in MFA-Creative Writing Program

Monday, July 23:   Lecture by Prof. Farrell O'Gorman, DePaul University: "O'Connor, Catholicism, and the American Gothic Tradition: 'Monkish Fables' of the New World." This lecture addresses the complex relationship between Catholicism and American individualism in O'Connor's published novels in light of early depictions of that relationship in the American Gothic tradition.

Tuesday, July 24:   Reading by Farrell O'Gorman and open-mic reading by Institute participants

Wednesday, July 25:   Lecture by Prof. Sarah Gordon, GCSU: "Long Shots and Close-Ups: Flannery O'Connor and Diane Arbus." This lecture explores the use of narrative distance and comic exaggeration in O'Connor's fiction as the means of creating a world from which she would have been--by race, sex, and class--excluded. O'Connor's famously fierce narrative voice is comparable to the unrelenting eye of the photographer Diane Arbus. The end that O'Connor set herself--that we are all "other"--separates O'Connor from Arbus.

Thursday, July 26:   Reading by David Muschell and Karen Salyer McElmurray, GCSU faculty in MFA-Creative Writing Program

Saturday, July 28:   Reading by Sarah Gordon and open-mic reading by Institute participants