Date of Award

8-1991

Degree Type

Master's Essay - Restricted

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Literatures, Languages, and Cultures

Abstract

Flannery O'Connor, a twentieth-century Catholic Southern American novelist and short story writer, slips this "explanation" as to what she means by art into a talk called "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," just after she has told her audience that Jacques Maritain "explains" what he means by habit (as in "the habit of art") as "a certain quality or virtue of the mind" (MM, pp. 64-65). While disarming her listeners' fear of art as being something "a little too grand," O'Connor introduces some rather grand claims herself on behalf of fictional art, the nature of which she rather states than explains. A master of selectivity and compression in her fiction, O'Connor here condenses several centuries of a literary, theological, and aesthetic tradition into a few highly selective remarks which raise more questions than they answer, and cause her non-fictional prose, like her fiction, to "hang on and expand in the mind" (cf. MM, p. 108).

Comments

An Essay submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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