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“The Words to Say It”: Using Flannery O’Connor to Reconsider Lacan
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Doreen Fowler takes a new approach to O’Connor by showing how her fiction both anticipates and revises the work of Jacques Lacan. Though others have used Lacan to read O’Connor’s fiction, this chapter is the first to note that both authors’ explorations of mystery (psychological for Lacan and theological for O’Connor) center around language, which they recognize as an obstacle to transcendent meaning. Fowler ultimately rereads the Lacanian Real as O’Connor’s encounter with the Divine Life, arguing that what Lacan sees as coming to the end of meaning making is what O’Connor sees as the precondition for grace.
Title: “The Words to Say It”: Using Flannery O’Connor to Reconsider Lacan
Description:
Doreen Fowler takes a new approach to O’Connor by showing how her fiction both anticipates and revises the work of Jacques Lacan.
Though others have used Lacan to read O’Connor’s fiction, this chapter is the first to note that both authors’ explorations of mystery (psychological for Lacan and theological for O’Connor) center around language, which they recognize as an obstacle to transcendent meaning.
Fowler ultimately rereads the Lacanian Real as O’Connor’s encounter with the Divine Life, arguing that what Lacan sees as coming to the end of meaning making is what O’Connor sees as the precondition for grace.
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