In her essay titled “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” the modern American literary-theologian Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) states, “…fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art. … Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.”
During this series, we will read and discuss from O’Connor’s canon three short stories in which she draws portraits of aspiring writers who “scorn getting dusty” and whose preconceptions of writing are challenged by their encounters with the ‘flesh and blood’ of reality. The selections that we'll study as representations of O’Connor’s incarnational artistry are: “The Partridge Festival,” “The Enduring Chill,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”
Victor Judge serves as the assistant dean for academic affairs and as lecturer in literature and religion at Vanderbilt University Divinity School where he teaches courses in the canons of literary-theologians Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as well a course titled Writing Creatively About Religion. He also serves on the faculty of the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning at Vanderbilt where he teaches a writing workshop titled The Writing Life. Having earned his baccalaureate and graduate degrees from George Peabody College of Vanderbilt, he is in the forty-fifth year of his vocation as an education.
Victor is new to The Porch. Welcome!
