The Catholic College of the South
Dr. Farrell O’Gorman
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
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
- Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- B.A., University of Notre Dame
- 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).
- 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
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