Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor ed. by Robert Donahoo and Marshall Bruce Gentry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor ed. by Robert Donahoo and Marshall Bruce Gentry Lingfeng Nie (bio) Robert Donahoo and Marshall Bruce Gentry (eds.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor, The Modern Language Association of America, 2019, 260 pp., $29.00, ISBN: 978-1-6032-9406-5. The popular MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature has been committed to providing instructors with specific pedagogical advice on literary works or writers. This volume on Flannery O'Connor is the first book dedicated to a major Southern woman writer, filling a gap in the scholarly literature on approaches to teaching O'Connor. The editors are distinguished O'Connor experts: Donahoo has coauthored Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism (2020), and Gentry is the editor of the Flannery O'Connor Review. They have gathered twenty great O'Connor scholars and instructors who have met the daunting challenge of teaching O'Connor's oeuvre, produced in the mid-twentieth century, to high school and college students in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The result is an ambitious anthology, providing perceptive readings as well as updated approaches to teaching O'Connor. The book is appropriately divided into two parts. The first, much shorter part, "Materials," introduces an invaluable compendium of background information, such as a succinct summary of accessible editions of O'Connor's works, a useful list of reference works—mainly biographies and monographs—for teaching O'Connor, a review of the most significant critical scholarship on O'Connor (involving historical, religious, and Southern culture studies), and a guide to the audiovisual resources related to O'Connor (including film adaptations, documentaries, and digital resources). There is also a brief but helpful mention of the collection of O'Connor manuscripts housed at Georgia College and State University and Emory University. This part closes with an extremely small segment on O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah and her final home, in Andalusia. Guided by the results of an online survey of 149 instructors teaching O'Connor, "Approaches," the second and most substantial part, is organized into five sections to address thorny issues confronting them and offer new pedagogical strategies to approach the works of O'Connor. The first section, "The Author as Teacher: O'Connor as Self-Critic," focuses on O'Connor's comments on her own works and Brantley's suggestions on how to use O'Connor's correspondence to engage students, revealing how she "wanted to shape or at least take part in the critical discourse on her work" (47). The subsequent section, "O'Connor and Religion," meaningfully unravels the most common myth—that O'Connor's works are evidence of her Christian faith, which has long been "a mainstay for O'Connor criticism and a stumbling block for teachers" (30). "Contexts: Race, History, Film, and Science," the third section, not only situates O'Connor in historical, [End Page 123] social, and cultural context but also proposes interdisciplinary approaches by putting O'Connor's works in dialogue with science and technology studies and ecocriticism. The following section—for me, the most interesting section—"O'Connor and Other Authors," considers O'Connor's corpus in conjunction with authors such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ann Petry, Alice Walker, Junot Díaz, and Toni Morrison, as well as in the context of popular music. This part ends with the valuable section, "Specialized Perspectives," opening the study of O'Connor to new angles and topics, including, for example, women's studies, narrative stylistics, and disability and medical studies in accordance with the development of modern literary theory. The essays collected in the volume, although diverse in scope and topic, are bonded together by the persistent effort to fully capture the complexity of O'Connor and her works. It is assumed that O'Connor is interesting to students only as a Catholic Southern writer, and her works make sense only through "theology and her personal religious beliefs" (3). The book reveals a multifaceted, modern O'Connor who defies easy summation and whose works have continuing value and lend themselves readily to various pedagogical approaches and critical theories. For example, Doug Davis recommends...