The basic plan for the Institute is as follows: we will have one week (Monday through Saturday, July 2-7) of orientation and consultation with the Co-Directors. Participants will tour Andalusia (the O'Connor farm, just outside Milledgeville), as well as other local O'Connor-related sites in Milledgeville. The next three weeks (Mondays through Fridays, July 9-27) feature lectures and seminar meetings, and each participant will have one week in the O'Connor Collection. The last two days (Monday and Tuesday, July 30-31) will consist of reports by the participants on what they have accomplished during the Institute. We will divide participants into three groups of roughly equal size (A, B, C) so that they may have the opportunity to spend extended periods of time in the Special Collections reading room examining O'Connor's manuscripts, the books in O'Connor's personal library, and other materials. Each group may spend a week (30 hours) in the reading room. Participants with the most clearly defined projects in mind will be placed in the first group to be scheduled in the reading room; participants who need more time to consider options will be allowed to wait awhile before beginning their time in the reading room.

The bulk of the Institute will involve lectures and group discussions about the issues that arise from O'Connor's works; individual consultations between participants and Faculty; and field trips, film screenings with discussions, and readings by creative writers. Lectures and some other events will be held in the evening so that all participants may be involved. Seminar meetings will be repeated so that seminar size remains small and so that participants have an opportunity to be involved with most of the faculty members at some point. Certain works for which there are large manuscript collections (esp. Wise Blood ) will receive more attention from seminar leaders than works for which there are few drafts.

Week Two (July 9-13) has as its focus "O'Connor: The South, Race, Gender, and Satire." Faculty are Patricia Yaeger (Michigan) and Virginia Wray (Lyon). Yaeger, author of Dirt and Desire and other works on southern women's writing (as well as the new Editor of PMLA ) will lecture on O'Connor and 1950 gender roles. The title of her lecture is "Flannery O'Connor and John Wayne." Wray, past President of the Flannery O'Connor Society and past editor of the O'Connor newsletter, Cheers!, will lecture on the significance of the manuscripts of O'Connor's unfinished third novel. Yaeger's seminars will address the story "Parker's Back" as a post-colonial text, as well as gender issues in Wise Blood. Wray's seminars will address both the beginning and the end of O'Connor's career: her skills as a satirist and her treatment of race in her earliest stories, as well as O'Connor's reworking of--and eventual retreat from--her plans for a third novel.

Week Three (July 16-20) has as its focus "Theology in Relations to O'Connor's Outsiders." Faculty are Michael Kreyling (Vanderbilt) and Richard Giannone (Fordham). Kreyling, author of Inventing Southern Literature, will lecture on O'Connor's engagement with important thinkers and how that illuminates the intersections between O'Connor's Catholicism and her southern cultural beliefs. Giannone, author of Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love and Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist, will lecture on how O'Connor found certainty in uncertain times, a topic complicated by O'Connor's writing about outsiders of improbable sorts. Kreyling's seminars will address race in relation to theology, as well as faith in relation to the body and sexuality. Giannone's seminars will address issues arising from O'Connor's treatment of outsiders: cultural deceit and desire, demonic energy, scapegoating, the victimized body.

Week Four (July 23-27) has as its focus "O'Connor: Bioethics, Theology, and the Narrative Voice." Faculty are Farrell O'Gorman (Mississippi State) and Sarah Gordon (GCSU). O'Gorman, author of Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction, will lecture on the 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. Gordon, author of Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination and former Editor of The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin and Review, will lecture on Flannery O'Connor's narrative distance and comic exaggeration in relation to photographer Diane Arbus. O'Gorman's seminars will address O'Connor's experiences with illness and her knowledge about various medical issues and programs. Gordon's seminars will address narrative voice in O'Connor, exaggeration as a fictional technique, using biography in determining artistic meaning, and cartooning as visual hyperbole.