STARKVILLE, Miss.--The ghost of Flannery O'Connor is luring three Mississippi State literary scholars to France next month to participate in an international conference on the work of the late American writer.
The Savannah, Ga.-born author died of a debilitating blood disease in 1964 at the age of 39. But her stories--combining humor, tragedy, brutality, and theology--endure.
In the literary tradition of noted Mississippi author Eudora Welty, O'Connor's work focused on physically and psychologically crippled Southerners. Her body of work included 31 short stories and two novels.
Participating in the Feb. 9-11 conference at the University of Brittany at Rennes 2 will be university English professors Noel Polk, a specialist in the American novel; Brad Vice, who is receiving the 2005 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction this fall; and Farrell O'Gorman, author of a new book on O'Connor and Mississippi writer Walker Percy of Greenville.
"Flannery O'Connor was a thoughtful Christian living at mid-20th century--a time when she feared modern rationalism was on the verge of eradicating religious belief altogether, at least among the educated," said O'Gorman.
"She also was a Catholic living in an overwhelmingly Calvinist South that she alternately admired and deplored, and she believed her seemingly peculiar geographical circumstances somehow worked to her advantage as a writer," he said of O'Connor, whose masterful "A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories" appeared in 1955.
A Columbia, S.C., native and MSU faculty member since 2003, O'Gorman is the author of, "Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction." The book, critically acclaimed as an "impeccable exercise in literary history and criticism," is a new release by the Louisiana State University Press.
O'Gorman and Vice will present papers at the French conference, which is expected to attract scholars from throughout the United States and Europe. The event is sponsored by the French university's Faulkner Foundation, a center for the study of Mississippian William Faulkner and other Southern writers.
"The occasion for the conference is the appearance of O'Connor's short stories on the syllabus for a national exam, the aggregation," explained Polk, who joined the MSU faculty this past fall after many years at the University of Southern Mississippi. Founder of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, he currently serves as editor of the MSU-based Mississippi Quarterly, a literary journal.
An authority on the works of Faulkner and Welty, and an invited professor of the French foundation in 1996, Polk will chair a couple of conference sessions. He also will speak at a tribute to Michel Gresset, an old friend who for the last quarter century has been France's leading translator of American and Southern literature into the French.
Vice, a native of Tuscaloosa, Ala., is receiving the annual Flannery O'Connor award for "The Bear Bryant Funeral Train," an original work of fiction. Given by the University of Georgia Press, the award was established in 1982 to encourage young writers by bringing their work to the attention of readers and critics.
"I grew up around the University of Alabama and my book pays homage to our most famous citizen, (head football coach and gridiron icon) Bear Bryant, though he is only in the background of my fiction," said Vice, who joined the MSU faculty in 2002. "Many of the stories are about farm life."
Vice's fiction has been anthologized in New Stories from the South in 1997, Best New American Voices in 2003 and Stories from the Blue Moon Café, Vol. III. Among his notable works is "Report from Junction," which was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 2002.
Vice, who holds a doctorate in English and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, taught for a year at Arkansas Tech University before coming to MSU. O'Gorman holds a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and taught at Wake Forest University for three years before coming to Starkville. Polk is a 1970 University of South Carolina doctoral graduate.
NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: To reach the three faculty members, telephone the English department at (662) 325-3644.