Aristotle, Plato, and Flannery

My "History of Literary Criticism and Theory" class just discussed Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" in the light of Aristotle's Poetics and Plato's Allegory of the Cave, among other things. I don't know if they enjoyed it, but I sure did! They are so bright they shine. We covered all the points I had in mind, I think, and students brought up most of them. That makes teaching a joy. It's a relief, I'm sure, to be on the solid ground of 20th century short fiction after I bombarded the class with Postmodern chaos at the beginning of the course, posing the question, "How did we get to this particular postmodern moment in time?" before going back in time to Plato and Aristotle. Thursday, we'll tackle two more O'Connor stories, and maybe bring in some of our reading from Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy. I'll post more next Monday and Tuesday, when we're off for a (short) FALL BREAK.