The Body in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction

About this book

"At the intersection of literary theory and linguistics, The Body in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction extends the innovative thesis that it is possible to grasp the central struggle between spirit and matter in O'Connor through a close quantitative examination of the interactions of grammatical voice and physical bodies in her texts. Donald E. Hardy demonstrates that the many constructions in which the body parts of O'Connor's characters are foregrounded, either as subjects or objects, are grammatical manipulations of semantic variations on what linguists deem the middle voice - roughly indicating that the subject is acting upon himself or herself." "Hardy combines computational and linguistic methodology to provide a productive approach to understanding O'Connor's use of the body and its parts in her explorations of the sacramental and the grotesque. Linguistic analysis of grammatical middle voice is coupled with quantitative analysis of body-part words and the collocations in which they appear to present a new point of entrance to understanding O'Connor's stylistic manipulations of the body as central to the rift between spirit and matter." "Hardy makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of work that is introducing linguistic terminology and concepts into literary studies and by extension the broader field of interpretive humanities."--Jacket.