Steven Parmenius

  Flannery O’Connor was not an American but a southern American. Moreover she was not an author but a woman author. Nor was she a Christian but a Catholic Christian in the land of the Mayflower and the ferociously anti-Catholic Klan. Indeed, I was wrong. She was not a woman author but a quite-possibly -queer woman author (as far as her limited romantic experience went). To this we might add ‘disabled’ (by lupus) if, in contemporary fashion, we wished to form an extended compound like ‘disabled-lesbian-female-southern-catholic-writer’. Of course, Flannery O’Connor was also white. This is one bit of sameness this heavily othered author seems to have clung to in spite of what may have been her better judgment. Her core ‘eye’ is that of a white southerner who regards both the racial attitudes of her ‘folk’ and their ‘negro’ victims with detached bemusement rather than outrage. This makes here a new kind of ‘other’ where a 21st century progressive readership is concerned for it seems to us

  Monsters are an odd thing: people encounter them but people never find them. What I mean by this is that monsters reveal themselves on their own terms but never ours. A resident of Washington State might  meet  Bigfoot on a dark country road but anyone who goes  looking  for Bigfoot meets empty air. Bigfoot does not appear as a thing present to hand but only as a numinous encounter. This strikes me as a basic trope of any monster narrative. The monster resists totalization: any attempt to locate, identify, classify, weigh or register the monster as a standard entity in relation to other standard entities comes up empty. Yet, just as the earnest searcher has given up on Nessie, his latest sonar sweep coming up as empty as every past sonar sweep, another sighting reignites his hopes! Perhaps there is no Nessie OR we need more powerful sonar equipment. A phenomenology, however, is constituted by bracketing that (to me) not very interesting question. Clearly, this suspense between lege