Post-War American Literature, Part 1: Short Fiction

In this course, we read selections from two extraordinary authors—Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter—whose stories, taken together, enable us to encounter their worlds. Flannery O’Connor’s is the world of faith, Catholicism in particular, in all its spiritual—and ethical—complexity. Her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior and her deeply sardonic “southern” sense of humor is based on the disparity between her characters’ limited perceptions and the extraordinary fate awaiting them. In several stories we read, O'Connor explores issues still alive today: The Holocaust, race relations, and intersexuality, where characters do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. Katherine Anne Porter’s world describes the collusion of good and evil in carefully crafted irony and penetrating psychological insight. As V.S. Pritchett puts it, “Her prose is severe and exact; her ironies are subtle, but hard . . . [Her] singularity as a writer is her truthful exploration of a complete consciousness.”  As Porter puts it, “I am interested in the individual thumbprint.”