These are some questions that an English teacher asked me today when I was substituting at a middle school.
I was sitting in the teachers’ lounge when a woman walks in. I had spoken to her earlier in the day when she asked if I had any questions and told me that she would be next door if there were any problems. She sees that am reading a book:
“So what are you reading?”
“Flannery O’Connor.”
“What’s Flannery O’Connor?”
“She is a writer.”
“Oh, what is it like?”
At this point I am too stunned to really think. I mumbled something about Southern Gothicism:
“Gothic? You mean like horror?”
At that point my head literally exploded. I mean it; there was blood and pieces of my brain on the walls.
How do you make it through college and not know who Flannery O’Connor is? What the hell is the horror question about? I didn’t ask her these questions because I probably would have ended up offending her, and I had to go back to class.
I really hope this woman was just messing with me; however I doubt it.
I do not think I will go back to this school again unless it is a last resort.
PS - I also found some these magazines with the regular teacher’s stuff:
I wonder if the science instruction is as good as the English instruction.
Throw in a sudden realization that you’re filled with sin and you have a scene worthy of Flannery.
One of my coolest memories from living in Georgia was sitting on the front porch of (O’Connor home) Andalusia one night smoking cigarettes and listening to a talented local stoner play Lorena and other civil war songs on a fiddle while just beyond the trees the “anti-aircraft lights” that marked the grand opening of the new Wal-Mart Megacenter were crisscrossing the sky. At one point (not making it up) an old illegitimate hinny* on the place started whinneying (or whatever the term is for the distinctive sound of a hinny) and this set off a chain reaction of barking dogs. Cool night (actually a hot one, but cool in the Fonzie sense).
*Fer city folk, a hinney is the offspring of a male horse and female donkey- I say illegitimate because this one was an unplanned pregnancy. This particular hinny’s father had been (according to the caretaker/curator) a work horse that had been on the farm when Flannery herself was there.
My stepdaughter is a teacher – kindergarten and early grades – and hasn’t read a book for fun since she graduated college, about 15 years ago. I doubt she’s heard of Flannery O’Connor. Hazel Mote? Sounds like somebody’s grandma.
I love Flannery O’Connor, but although I took several American Literature courses, I can’t recall any mention of her when I was in college. I learned about her from my great-aunt.
I am no longer surprised at the news of cultural illiteracy of anything that took place before the first season of American Idol.
I remember reading “The Violent Bear It Away” in high school and almost literally getting physically ill reading it. Fantastic writing but some truly horrific images.
Flannery O’Connor is probably my single favorite American author. She’s always my first example in discussions of the downside of the no-posthumous-Nobels policy.
But you’re going to have to go farther than that to surprise me about the failures of the American educational system.
Does O’Connor have a story about a very large woman who’s romantically involved with or married to a dwarf? Or if that’s not her, does anyone know what story I’m talking about?
Was the dwarf a hunchback? If so, it might be “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” by Carson McCullers. I can’t remember if they were actually lovers or if was just implied that they were or if was just something other characters suspected.
I didn’t encounter Flannery O’Connor in college until I took a course that specialized in post-war American Lit. She wasn’t covered in any of the survey courses I’ve taken – not Am Lit I (18th-19th centuries) or Am Lit II (WWI to about the 1970s). Her name might have been dropped in lecture, but we didn’t read anything by her.
She’s an excellent writer, but she’s not a Big Name in the way that, say, Hemingway is.
I know! I’m of the opinion that Hemingway’s fame has more do with him than his writing.
Two and Half Inches of Fun, the Southern Gothic is a pretty small blip on the literary radar. That’s not a statement about the value of it as a genre, that’s just the way it is. A degree in English education is more likely to focus on Dead British Dudes and Dead White Guys with Beards than a genre that’s really only developed in the 20th century, and the bulk of work in it produced after World War II. In addition to that, middle schools are more likely to teach contemporary YA fiction, so the teacher probably has a greater familiarity with that than you. The closest they get to Southern Gothic is probably “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Where the Red Fern Grows.”
And, yeah, Gothic novels are often dumbed down and described as “like horror.” It doesn’t really surprise me that someone who wasn’t familiar with Flannery O’Connor would ask that question, since Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have a lot of elements of horror, and it’s more likely that she was familiar with the literature of that century than the twentieth.
Take issue with the way literature is taught in college and middle schools, if you like, but this isn’t that big of a deal.
Meh. My daughter graduated with a degree in CREATIVE WRITING and she didn’t have a single course in Southern writers. Except for a few short stories, no O’Connor, no McCullors, no Tenessee Williams.
Personally, I think it’s sad when O’Connor is ghettoized as a “Southern Writer.” She should be a part of any course that treats of *American *writers at all, like Faulkner, whom you’re not likely to hear dismissed as merely “Southern.” Williams and McCullers, fine; ghettoize them. O’Connor should be taught wherever *writers *are taught.
[asshole]Personally, you think? Is there some other way a person can think?[/asshole]
Sorry, I just really hate this expression. Both “personally” and “I think” are used too much, and it is totally unnecessary to use them together. Look how stronger much your sentence would be it if you just removed them:
2.5" if you want your head to explode google “gothic horror.” I don’t find it surprising that someone might think southern gothic is related to horror. Look at the 90s show American Gothic - a horror series about southerners!
Kidding aside, horror is filled with the supernatural, and so is some of gothic fiction. Anyway, it’s not like she asked “Gothic? Like Evanescence? Was she on bass or something?” That’d be really wrong: Evanescence is alternative metal.
2.5", in defense of your cohort, I had never heard of the genre Southern Gothic before. Looking at the Wikipedia definition, I’d include Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Harper Lee and Cormac McCarthy amongst my favorite authors. I’ve only read O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, but that collection is terrific. I almost wish I grew up in the South (well, not really) just so that I could have bizarre stories to tell, sort of like Sampiro.
