A Good Man is Hard to Find Flannery O'Connor (Audiobook)

Flannery O'Connor Analysis on "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Grace and Theology: A Necessary Discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Heather Chandler D.H. Lawrence asserts in his Studies in Classic American Literature, that “the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (8). While this approach is helpful and necessary in many works of literature, it is both misleading and damaging to do so with Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” A popular new way of interpreting her work is to look through a secular lens, but separating her Catholic beliefs and allusions reduces her work to a simplistic ambiguous tale, molded to suit our own postmodern desires; and, this is essentially as misguided as looking at Da Vinci’s Last Supper and refusing to note its religious connotations. Instead, we should look at the larger picture,...

Tiny House Living and Transcendentalism

This week's class will explore transcendentalism, Emerson, and Thoreau. But like most of the topics we've studied so far, we can find modern connections. Transcendentalism was a religious movement that grew out of Romanticism between 1836-1860. We can define it as a spiritual, philosophical, literary movement with ties to the Unitarian Church around Boston. Like Romanticism, this movement emphasized individual rights and inspiration, the latter, especially within nature. Transcendentalists believed that individuals can discover truth for themselves, rather than learning it through tradition. It differs from Romanticism in that it focused on God. Transcendentalists believed that God was everywhere and could be discovered through intuition and that all people have a divine inner light. By accessing this light or intuition, they can transcend the ordinary and experience the spiritual. The five tenets of Transcendentalism: 1. Nonconformity 2. Self-Reliance 3. Importanc...

April 3rd Review

We are in our final month of classes! I hope you have learned quite a bit of American history and have a deeper understanding of its connection with American literature. We are finishing the second third of our final book now. Please read up to page 167 for this next week's class. You will have your final essay due on April 17th over this novel. You can use any of the accompanying texts I gave you in class yesterday to help you write a more thoughtful or better-supported essay. You can also conduct your own research that matches the topic you'd like to discuss. As long as you can tie your discussion to the novel and provide a detailed analysis of a scene in the book to prove your point, you are on the right track. As far as history, we discussed the Cold War yesterday and its causes and its effects on American culture. One response included building up the military forces and increasing its budget. This had only previously happened during combat engagement. As Dwight Eisenhow...

Harper's Academy U.S. History and American Literature

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