Desire Violence and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction Katherine Anne Porter Flannery O connor Cormac Mccarthy Walker Percy Southern Literary Studies 1st Edition by Gary Ciuba ISBN 0807138630 978-0807138632

Desire Violence and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction Katherine Anne Porter Flannery O connor Cormac Mccarthy Walker Percy Southern Literary Studies 1st Edition by Gary M. Ciuba – Ebook PDF Instant Download/Delivery: 0807138630, 978-0807138632
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Product details: 

ISBN 10: 0807138632

ISBN 13: 0807138630 978

Author: Gary M. Ciuba

In this groundbreaking study, Gary M. Ciuba examines how four of the South’s most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction — Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy — expose the roots of violence in southern culture. Ciuba draws on the paradigm of mimetic violence developed by cultural and literary critic René Girard, who maintains that individual human nature is shaped by the desire to imitate a model. Mimetic desire may lead in turn to rivalry, cruelty, and ultimately community-sanctioned — and sometimes ritually sanctified — victimization of those deemed outcasts. Ciuba offers an impressively broad intellectual discussion that gives universal cultural meaning to the southern experience of desire, violence, and divinity with which these four authors wrestled and out of which they wrote.
In a comprehensive analysis of Porter’s semiautobiographical Miranda stories, Ciuba focuses on the prescribed role of women that Miranda imitates and ultimately escapes. O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away reveals three characters whose scandalous animosity caused by religious rivalry leads to the unbearable stumbling block of violence. McCarthy’s protagonist in Child of God, Lester Ballard, appears as the culmination of a long tradition of the sacred violence of southern religion, twisted into his own bloody faith. And Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome brings Ciuba’s discussion back to the victim, in Tom Moore’s renunciation of a society in which scapegoating threatens to become the foundation of a new social regime. From nostalgia for the old order to visions of a utopian tomorrow, these authors have imagined the interrelationship of desire, antagonism, and religion throughout southern history. Ciuba’s insights offer new ways of reading Porter, O’Connor, McCarthy, and Percy as well as their contemporaries who inhabited the same culture of violence — violence desired, dreaded, denied, and deified.

Table of contents: 

1. The Hanged Man at Old Sardis Church: The Culture of Violence and the Violence of Culture in the South

2. “Given Only Me for Model”: Porter’s “Miranda” Stories and the Dilemmas of Mimetic Desire

3. “Like a Boulder Blocking Your Path”: O’Connor’s Skandalon in The Violent Bear It Away

4. Mccarthy’s Enfant Terrible: Incarnating Sacred Violence in Child of God

5. No More for Azazel: Victimizing the Sign and Signifying the Victim in Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome

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Gary Ciuba,Desire Violence,Divinity in Modern,Anne Porter