A Study Guide For Flannery O Connor S Life You Save May Be Your Own

A Study Guide for Flannery O'Connor's "Life You Save May Be Your Own," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Flannery O'Connor's "Life You Save May Be Your Own," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide to Flannery O'Conner's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common." A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.

Considers the legacy of Thomas Merton and his relevance for contemporary times. With the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, Thomas Merton became a bestselling author, writing about spiritual contemplation in a modern context. Although Merton (1915–1968) lived as a Trappist monk, he advocated a spiritual life that was not a retreat from the world, but an alternative to it, particularly to the deadening materialism and spiritual vacuity of the postwar West. Over the next twenty years, Merton wrote for a wide audience, bringing the wisdom of Christianity, Buddhism, and Sufism into dialogue with the period’s contemporary thought. In Thinking through Thomas Merton, Robert Inchausti introduces readers to Merton and evaluates his continuing relevance for our time. Inchausti shows how Merton broke the high modernist trance so that we might become the change we wish to see in the world by refiguring the lost virtues of silence, contemplation, and community in a world enamored by the will to power, virtuoso performance, radical skepticism, and materialist metaphysics. Merton’s defense of contemplative culture is considered in light of the postmodern thought of recent years and emerges as a compelling alternative. “Inchausti explores Merton’s understanding of Western Christian monasticism and provides new insights into his critique of modernity.” — Curt Cadorette, author of Catholicism in Social and Historical Contexts: An Introduction

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background — all to help you gain greater insight into great works you're bound to study for school or pleasure. In CliffsNotes on O'Connor's Short Stories, you get to know eleven of Flannery O'Connor's thirty-two short stories. In them, she imbues her characters with such truth to life that they are thoroughly believable despite any outrageous behavior. This guide introduces you to the major themes of O'Connor's work and shows how her stories reflected her religious world view. In this study guide, you'll find Life of the Author, O'Connor's View of Her Writing, Suggested Essay Questions, and Critical Commentaries on the following works: A Good Man Is Hard to Find The Life You Save May Be Your Own The Displaced Person Good Country People Everything that Rises Must Converge and more Classic literature or modern-day treasure — you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.

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Known for her violent, startling stories that culminate in moments of grace, Flannery O'Connor depicted the postwar segregated South from a unique perspective. This volume proposes strategies for introducing students to her Roman Catholic aesthetic, which draws on concepts such as incarnation and original sin, and offers alternative contexts for reading her work. Part 1, "Materials," describes resources that provide a grounding in O'Connor's work and life. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," discuss her beliefs about writing and her distinctive approach to fiction and religion; introduce fresh perspectives, including those of race, class, gender, and interdisciplinary approaches; highlight her craft as a creative writer; and suggest pairings of her works with other texts. Alice Walker's short story "Convergence" is included as an appendix.

Flannery O'Connor, Tim Gautreaux, and Walker Percy, are all Catholic writers from the South-and seem to embody very fully both parts of that label. Yet as quickly becomes clear in their writing, their fiction employs markedly different tones and modes of addressing their audience. O'Connor seems intent on shocking her reader, whom she anticipates will be hostile to her deepest beliefs. Gautreaux gently and humorously engages his reader, inviting his expected sympathetic audience to embrace the characters' needed moral growth. Percy satirically lampoons an array of social ills and failings in the Church, as he tries to get his audience laughing with him while he makes his deadly serious point about the flaws he finds in the church and larger culture. Why do these three writers assume such divergent images of their audience? Why do texts by three writers who each embrace their Southern locale and their Catholic beliefs seem to have so little in common? To answer these questions, Nisly helps readers understand these authors' fiction by examining the role that place and time had in shaping each author's idea of an audience-and, by extension, his or her manner of addressing that audience. More specifically, Nisly focuses on each author's experience of Catholic community and each author's placement in relation to the Second Vatican Council. Linking together biographical information and a reading of their fiction, Nisly argues that O'Connor's, Gautreaux's, and Percy's sense of audience has been shaped in significant ways by each author's own local experience of Catholicism in his or her home region as well as the larger, global changes of Vatican II that transformed Roman Catholicism.

Examines the life and writings of Flannery O'Connor, including detailed synopses of her works, explanations of literary terms, biographies of friends and family, and social and historical influences.

Looks at the lives and writings of four authors who share the Catholic faith.