Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:44:48.810Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

States of Salvation: Wise Blood and the Rise of the Neoliberal Right

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Myka Tucker-Abramson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Situating Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood in the changing racial geographies of post-World War II Atlanta, this essay argues that Hazel Motes's religious journey toward embracing Jesus as his Savior allegorizes a recuperative fantasy of the white Southern subject's journey from Jim Crowto white flight. Through this journey, Wise Blood offers an astute vision of the racial struggles over Atlanta, out of which neoliberalism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; thus, we might reconsider O'Connor as a central participant in the aesthetic and political struggles over the making of postwar urban space and politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 5 , October 2017 , pp. 1166 - 1180
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Allen, Frederick. Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City, 1946–1996. Longstreet Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. U of California P, 2004.Google Scholar
Bacon, Jon Lance. Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture. Cambridge UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Bacon, Jon Lance. “A Fondness for Supermarkets: Wise Blood and Consumer Culture.” New Essays on Wise Blood, edited by Michael Kreyling, Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 25–50.Google Scholar
Baumbach, Jonathan. “The Acid of God's Grace: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor.” Georgia Review, vol. 17, no. 3, Fall 1963, pp. 334–46.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Translated by Harry Zohn. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1939–1940, edited by Eiland, Howard and Jennings, Michael W., Translated by Edward Jephcott et al., Belknap Press, 1999, pp. 313–55. Vol. 4 of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings.Google Scholar
The Bible. English Standard Version. Bible Study Tools, 2017, www.biblestudytools.com/esv/daniel/5.html.Google Scholar
Bone, Martyn. The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Louisiana State UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Bové, Paul A. “Agriculture and Academe: America's Southern Question.” Boundary 2, vol. 14, no. 3, Spring 1986, pp. 169–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Bill. “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory).” PMLA, vol. 120, no. 3, May 2005, pp. 734–50.Google Scholar
Craig, Robert Michael. Atlanta Architecture: Art Deco to Modern Classic, 1929–1959. Pelican Publishing, 1995.Google Scholar
Davis, Angela Y. “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System.” The Angela Y. Davis Reader, edited by James, Joy, Blackwell Publishers, 1998, pp. 74–95.Google Scholar
Edmunds, Susan. Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State. Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (1920–22), translated by James Strachey, Hogarth Press / Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955, pp. 1–64.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. U of California P, 2006.Google Scholar
Goff, James R. Jr. Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel. U of North Carolina P, 2002.Google Scholar
Hoberek, Andrew. “Liberal Antiliberalism: Mailer, O'Connor, and the Gender Politics of Middle-Class Ressentiment.” Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 33, nos. 3–4, Winter 2005, pp. 24–47.Google Scholar
Hohle, Randolph. Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism. Routledge, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hubbard, Scott. “The Refiner's Fire and the Imago Dei: The Nature of the Self in Flannery O'Connor's ‘Revelation.‘” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2012, pp. 38–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, Matthew T. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. U of Minnesota P, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century Novel. Princeton UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Katz, Claire. “Flannery O'Connor's Rage of Vision.” American Literature, vol. 46, no. 1, Mar. 1974, pp. 54–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinney, Arthur F. “Flannery O'Connor and the Fiction of Grace.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 27, no. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 71–96.Google Scholar
Kruse, Kevin M. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Karl. “Flannery O'Connor's Prophetic Imagination.” Religion and Literature, vol. 26, no. 3, Autumn 1994, pp. 33–58.Google Scholar
McCown, Robert M. “Flannery O'Connor and the Reality of Sin.” Catholic World, vol. 188, Jan. 1959, pp. 285–91.Google Scholar
Murphy, Joseph C. “Learning from Atlanta: Prophecy and Postmodernism in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood” Literature and Belief, vol. 23, no. 2, Dec. 2006, pp. 1–26. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41319887.Google Scholar
Murphy, Joseph C. “The Smile of Agony: Four-Level Interpretation from Dante Alighieri to Flannery O'Connor.” From Shadows to Light: Dante and His Times, Third Annual Fu Jen University Medieval Conference, 21 Mar. 2002, Fu Jen University. Fu Jen University Medieval Conference, www.svd.ju.edu.tw/fl/medieval/m3_joe.html.Google Scholar
O'Connor, Flannery. “The Church and the Fiction Writer.” O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 146–66.Google Scholar
O'Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 25–35.Google Scholar
O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. edited by Fitzgerald, Sally and Fitzgerald, Robert, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961.Google Scholar
O'Connor, Flannery. “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 63–86.Google Scholar
O'Connor, Flannery. “Novelist and Believer.” O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 154–67.Google Scholar
O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.Google Scholar
Pinkerton, Steve. “Profaning the American Religion: Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 43, no. 4, 2011, pp. 449–69. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41319887.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ragen, Brian Abel. A Wreck on the Road to Damascus: Innocence, Guilt, and Conversion in Flannery O'Connor. Loyola UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Rutheiser, Charles. Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams. Verso, 1996.Google Scholar
Segrest, Mab. “The Milledgeville Asylum and the Georgia Surreal.” Southern Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 3, 2011, pp. 114–50.Google Scholar
Shinn, Thelma J. “Flannery O'Connor and the Violence of Grace.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, 1968, pp. 58–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. Routledge, 1996.Google Scholar
Stelzmann, Rainulf. “Shock and Orthodoxy: An Interpretation of Flannery O'Connor's Novels and Short Stories.” Xavier University Studies, vol. 2, Mar. 1963, pp. 4–21.Google Scholar
Stoneback, H.R. “‘Stuck in the Cornfields with His Family’: Sense of Place in O'Connor's ‘he Displaced Person.‘” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, 1983, pp. 545–55.Google Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Yaeger, Patricia. “Flannery O'Connor and the Aesthetics of Torture.” Flannery O'Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Rath, Sura P. and Shaw, Mary Neff, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 183–206.Google Scholar
Zarafonetis, Michael James. The “Fabulous” Fox Theatre and Atlanta, 1929–1975. 2010. Auburn U, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar