In honor of Flannery O'Connor's birthday on March 25 (1925-1964), here is her "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction." O'Connor's works can indeed be labeled grotesque in many ways, but, of course, while she herself does not shy from that word, she sees it as a deeply useful aspect of communication between a writer and her reader. "Whenever I'm asked," she writes, "why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological": http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/grotesque.html
To hear O'Connor read this essay, go to http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/listen_as_flannery_oconnor_reads_some_aspects_of_the_grotesque_in_southern_fiction_c_1960.html
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