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Dr. Farrell O’Gorman

Chair, Professor,

English

Watch His Interview

Meet Dr. Farrell O’Gorman

OF NOTE:
Believes that living fully depends upon seeking answers to the big questions raised in the humanities, questions that can’t be answered alone.

KNOWN FOR:
Engaging with students who care deeply about the big questions and want to do so in a setting where old answers aren’t shunned while also reading authors who pursue the truth in a way that is fresh and new.

POPULAR QUOTE:
“A story really isn’t any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind.” -Flannery O’Connor

Classes

Examples of the classes taught by Dr. Farrell O’Gorman:

CC 351: Studies in Christianity & Culture: Ireland (May intensive study abroad)
CC 350: Topics in Christianity & Culture: Ireland
EN 430W: Senior Thesis
EN 400: Special Topics: Christianity and Contemporary American Literature
EN 400: Special Topics: Flannery O’Connor and Her Legacy
EN 415: Twentieth-Century American Literature
EN 340: American Literature
HO 271: Honors American Literature
EN 211: Literary Classics of the Western Tradition I
EN 212: Literary Classics of the Western Tradition II
EN 203: Introduction to American Literature
RH101: Rhetoric I
RH 102: Rhetoric II

Bachelor Degree (B.A.) in English

Education

Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
B.A., University of Notre Dame

Representative Publications and Presentations

Monographs:
Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination. University of Notre Dame Press (2017), 326 pp.
Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Louisiana State University Press (2004), 259 pp. Reissued in paperback Fall 2007.
Scholarly Articles:
“‘O’Connor and the Rhetoric of Eugenics: Misfits, the ‘Unfit,’ and Us.” A Political Companion to Flannery O’Connor, ed. Henry Edmondson, UP of Kentucky (2017): 199-221.
“Re-writing American Borders: Religion, the South, and New World Gothic Narratives.” Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South, ed. Jason Phillips, Louisiana State UP (2013): 43-69.
“Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individualism in Lancelot: Percy, Dostoevsky, Poe.” A Political Companion to Walker Percy, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian Smith, UP of Kentucky (2013): 119-144.
“Violence, Nature, and Prophecy in Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy.”
Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism, ed. Robert Donahoo and Avis Hewitt, U Tennessee P (2010): 143-168.
“Tobias Wolff’s Back in the World: American Dreamers, American Desert, Saving Word.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 48:1 (Fall 2006): 71-89.
“White, Black, and Brown: Reading O’Connor After Richard Rodriguez.” Flannery O’Connor Review 4 (Special Feature: Flannery O’Connor & the Religious Dimension in Latino/a Fiction) (2006): 32-49.
“Joyce and Contesting Priesthoods in Suttree and Blood Meridian.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 4 (Winter 2005): 123-144. Reprint in You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville, ed. Rick Wallach. Cormac McCarthy Society (2012): 87-96.
“The Fugitive-Agrarians and the Twentieth-Century Southern Canon.” A Companion to The Regional Literatures of America, ed. Charles L. Crow, Blackwell (2003): 286-305.
“Languages of Mystery: Walker Percy’s Legacy in Contemporary Southern Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal 34:2 (Spring 2002): 97-119.
“The Angelic Artist in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.” Renascence 53.3 (Fall 2000): 61-79.
“Walker Percy, the Catholic Church, and Southern Race Relations, ca. 1947-1970.” Mississippi
Quarterly 53.1 (Winter 1999-2000): 67-88.
“Irish Stage Identities in Friel’s Translations & Stoppard’s Travesties: Defenders of the Word in an Age of Linguistic Impoverishment.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 24.2 (Dec. 1998): 1-13.
“The Things They Carried as Composite Novel.” War, Literature, & the Arts 10.2 (Fall-Winter 1998): 289-309. Reprint in Short Story Criticism 74, ed. Joseph Palmisano, Gale Group (2004).
Reprint in The Things They Carried, ed. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations Series, Chelsea House (2011).

Research / Area of Expertise

American Literature, Irish Literature, Creative Writing
Southeast regional representative, national Conference on Christianity & Literature, 2019-2022
BAC faculty representative, Lilly Fellows Program (Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities), 2017-present