Ideas & Questions: Flannery O'CONNOR & Ralph ELLISON
Terry Eagleton argues that “Literature” is a construction. In other words, it's something we create through critical value-judgments that can change over time, rooted in ideology. When ideologies change, our conception of literature likewise shifts.
Similarly, Curtis White recounts how critical assessment of literature at the university has shifted from New Criticism to “deconstruction” to Cultural Studies, where Madonna and Milton, Yeats and OJ are now all equally valid texts for scholarly consideration.
Keep these ideas in mind when you think about our leap from recent popular horror (King) and fiction (Proulx) to 1950s modernism.
Ideas & Questions for Study
1. Consider the similarities and differences between the O'Connor and Ellison pieces.
2. Focus a comparison/contrast on the figures of the Misfit and the Invisible Man.
3. Are the Misfit, Invisible Man, and Devil (in King's story) the same kind of character? Do they serve similar literary purposes?
4. How do the stories suggest that modernization has created the Misfit and Invisible Man?
5. Bring the brief excerpt from Marshall Berman's "The Experience of Modernity" into conversation with the O'Connor and Ellison texts.
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