Matt Bryant Cheney (Georgia College and State University)
matt@****.com (Log-in to reveal)
Flannery O’Connor, who would have turned 100 in 2025, died young yet became a towering figure in American literature, winning posthumous acclaim and intense scholarly attention. Despite her unchanged body of work, new discoveries—letters, unpublished writings, personal artifacts—spark fresh debates about her literary standing. This session will examine ongoing questions: Why should we read O’Connor today? Where does she belong in American literary canons, and what future directions might O’Connor scholarship take?
March 25th, 2025, would have been Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday. Given that her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, lived until the age of 99, Flannery’s readers may be forgiven for speculatingabout what could have been. Even if O’Connor had lived to 70 (the average US life expectancywhen she died in 1964), we would have called the run from Wise Blood (1952) to Everything thatRises Must Converge (1965) her “early period.”Instead, O’Connor died of lupus in 1964. She become among the most celebrated American writers of the 20th Century, winning the only posthumous National Book Award for Fiction ever granted (The Complete Stories in 1972) and attracting scholarly attention from seemingly every corner of the “big tent” of literary studies, not just the Southern specialists and Christian scholars.And still, recent years have brought important questions about O’Connor’s status as a widely anthologized, taught, and studied author. Her fiction remains unchanged, but we just keep learning more about the Georgia writer—bowdlerized letters unearthed, excerpts of a previously unpublished novel released, an Antebellum mansion full of previously unseen O’Connor belongings, and so on. But why, exactly, should we read Flannery O’Connor? Writing on her appears to be continuing unabated, but what does the future hold for Flannery O’Connor scholarship? To the extent that canons—American, Southern, Christian, Religious, Regionalist,Comic, Gothic, Short Story, Grotesque, Great Books—still have salience, where does O’Connor“live” now in American Literature? Why?
Proposals of 250-400 words (and a brief bio) should be sent to Matt Bryant Cheney (mattbryantcheney@gmail.com and matt.bc@gcsu.edu) by Monday, September 1st, 2025. Earlier statements of interest are strongly encouraged.