O’Connor professor will present ‘Prodigal’ paper in San Francisco

After a successful presentation of “Prodigal Daughters: Alice Walker and Flannery O’Connor” at Georgia College & Stage University, Dr. Bruce Gentry is taking his show on the road.
Gentry, GC&SU’s resident expert on O’Connor’s life and work, will present his paper about O’Connor’s relationship to Alice Walker, author of the award-winning novel”The Color Purple,” in San Francisco at the American Literature Association Conference, April 27-30.
“I’ve taught Alice Walker every once in a while over the years and I’ve been really committed to Flannery O’Connor for a long time,” Gentry said. “When I started hearing about all of the Alice Walker stuff in Eatonton, I thought I needed to think more about her connection with Flannery O’Connor.”
“Prodigal Daughters: Alice Walker And Flannery O’Connor” compares two characters from Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” to characters in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “Good Country People.”
“I think the Alice Walker story has a character kind of like the daughter in”The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” She also has a character like the daughter in “Good Country People,’” Gentry said. “Walker putting the two daughters at odds in her story is like putting on a battle between two O’Connor characters.”
Gentry said the relationship between O’Connor and Walker has been more direct. At one point, Walker even published an essay about her thoughts on O’Connor.
“Alice Walker read O’Connor, and I think she reacted to her,” Gentry said. “I think Alice Walker’s first collection of stories, “In Love and Trouble,” refers to O’Connor indirectly several times. Walker wrote an essay called “Reconstructing the Peacock” where she talks about bringing her mother down to visit O’Connor’s house at Andalusia. Somewhere in the course of the essay Alice Walker says, ‘When I think about how my house in Eatonton was not considered worthy of preservation, but Flannery O’Connor’s house was, I momentarily hated her guts.’ Then she goes on to talk about how O’Connor wrote about race and how she feels about O’Connor’s fiction, but the essay ends up being a tribute to O’Connor, and Alice Walker says she likes her.”
With that in mind, Gentry, excited to discuss his latest foray into O’Connor reading, will travel to San Francisco at the end of this month for the 2004 ALA conference.
“The ALA is a gathering of author’s societies. If you look at the program you will see the James Fennimore Cooper Society, the Mark Twain Society, the Eudora Welty and the Jewish American Writers group; the people who are putting together these programs are pretty committed to those authors,” Gentry said.
“It’s nice to know what’s going on, what people are doing now, but for me personally, it’s a deadline that’s useful. The way you get a paper done is ‘I’ve got to get this much done by this date.’ It’ll be a reason for me to make myself catch up with some things that I’ve been meaning to read, but I haven’t gotten around to. It’s my way of saying, ‘OK Bruce, you need to get started learning more about Alice Walker’ because she’s from Eatonton, and she’s somebody I need to learn more about.”
After reading O’Connor as an undergraduate at Arkansas State, Gentry decided to write a term paper on O’Connor that would eventually become a dissertation. While he admitted O’Connor intimidated him at first, Gentry grew to enjoy her work as a reflection of his own life.
“When I first started, I thought I wasn’t smart enough to know what to do with this stuff – it’s like playing with fire,” he said. “The way she talks about the relationships between parents and children — that’s what I responded to first. I could say that I am very close to my parents, but it’s never been an easy relationship. I think O’Connor gets all of those feelings on paper better than anyone else I’ve ever read.”
Gentry’s love for O’Connor runs deep. His successful book, “Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque,” and 15 published articles have surely solidified his position as an O’Connor expert.
“She’s not for everybody, but I think she’s terrific. I think she’s definitely the best writer to come out of the state of Georgia,” he said. “Every student should know that she went to GC&SU and, chances are, when you get into the outside world, if people know anything about GC&SU, it’s going to be that it is O’Connor’s school.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 23 2004. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry