Research and Critical Approaches

After reading "The Enduring Chill," I was pretty disgusted/intrigued by the relationship between Asbury and his sister and also their relationship with their mother. Then, the more I got to thinking about it, the more I realized that there are some strange (maybe that's too strong of a word) family relationships in these texts. I am trying to remain flexible with my paper topic, but I think the topic that I am most interested in is how families are represented and familial relations in O'Connor and Porter's works, so I have started researching families in their works. This is a brief overview of what I have thought about/done so far.

The stories I would like to especially look at with regards to the topic of families are "Revelation," "Good Country People," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," "The Enduring Chill," "The Geranium/Judgment Day," and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. I think there are more interesting families in O'Connor's works, but there are also some stories with families in Katherine Anne Porter's stories that would be good to use to like "Old Mortality," "Holiday," and "He." I may need to narrow this list down a little.

I think the best critical approach to family representation/relations would be to use a new critical or objective stance. A structuralist reading may also be helpful for parts of the paper as well. I generally do not like to use psychoanalysis, but it may be applicable here. Also, possibly new historicism and deconstruction.

I think I could tie this idea of family into other areas as well (let me pull out my Venn diagram here), such as religion, geography, time period and/or gender (I just want to do it all). I see overlaps with these categories because I am starting to think about why O'Connor and Porter portray their characters (especially the "children") the way they do. I would like to look into how religion, geography, time period and gender influence the constructs of family in their stories.

I have not looked through the letters too much to know what they wrote on the subject of family.

As soon as I can get to the Norlin library Monday morning, I am also going to check out some books that I found that contain essays that sound like they may help me as I form ideas about family (don't worry, I won't wipe out the library, and if I do, I'll share). One book is Beyond and Alone!, focusing on the section about family and isolation. Another one is From Texas to the world and back : essays on the journeys of Katherine Anne Porter, I would be focusing on the essay titled, "Katherine Anne Porter and the family saga." Another book is called God's Grandeur and I would be focusing on an article titled "Flannery O'Connor and a Catholic theology of the family." I think these books might possibly help other people, so I'll share! :)

I may be revising this post by Monday as I find more...