COD 2025 - D1187

Webinar - Flannery O’Connor and the Southern Gothic Imagination

Literature lovers

1 sessions, start: 11-Oct

Please enrol before Wednesday, October 8th 2025

Course detail

Year: 2025
Level: Culture Programme
Language: English
Status: Announced
Lugar: Distance
Facilitator/s: Mag. Griselda Beacon MA
Print course
ESSARP Schools
Free of charge
Exams Schools
ARS 35000.00
Non affiliate
ARS 35000.00

Sessions

Sessions Dates Start Finish
1 11 October 2025 10:00 am 11:30 am

Facilitator/s

Griselda Beacon

Griselda Beacon is a teacher educator and specializes in literature & art in ELT. Her interests include literature, young learners, CLIL, creativity and critical interculturality. Passionate about art in education, Griselda carries out projects with literature, storytelling, drama, visual arts and creative writing to foster self-expression and creativity in diverse and inclusive English language classrooms. She holds an MA in Literature and Foreign Language Teaching from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, and has been working in the field of teacher education and Primary curriculum development for over 20 years. She has been sharing her experience as an in-service teacher trainer and curriculum developer in Latin America, Europe, Africa & Asia. She is a co-author of Together (Oxford UP, 2018), an English coursebook series tailor-made for Argentina and co-editor of the book International Perspectives on Diversity in ELT (Palgrave, 2021). Griselda has taught Children’s & Young Adult Literature, Creativity, Drama Techniques in the English Class and Play, Music, Dance & Literature in Pre-Primary Education at Teacher Training Colleges in Buenos Aires. She regularly works as a consultant for educational institutions, such as language schools (NILE - Norwich Institute for Language Education) in the UK, ELT publishers (Oxford University Press) & libraries. At present, she lectures in American Literature at Universidad de Buenos Aires –UBA. In her spare time, Griselda loves dancing, getting lost in bookstores and taking drama classes.
Literature lovers
In this online reading breakfast session, we intend:
▪ To continue creating a reading community of lovers of literature.
▪ To continue developing reading strategies to tackle the ambiguous nature of literary texts.
▪ To learn about and explore the grotesque in Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic Imagination.
In this session, we will introduce Flannery O’Connor’s work, focusing on her portrayal of freaks and the grotesque in the American South. We will discuss how her Catholicism, personal circumstances, and the social tensions of the agrarian South influence her narrative. Her fiction is marked by the grotesque, the freakish, and the violent—key elements of her vision of the American South.
In this workshop, we will read three short stories, “Good Country People”, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”, to explore her central themes, and reflect on how her unsettling characters and narratives challenge conventional ideas of normalcy, morality, and grace. As always, we provide a selection of her short stories in advance for prior reading.
Online Reading Breakfast session. Dialogical and interactive approach in which participants will discuss the texts and the topics introduced as well as analyse the different ways in which artists express their concerns.
Fitzgerald, S. (1981-1982). “Assumption and Experience: Flannery O'Connor's ‘A Temple of The Holy Ghost’”. CrossCurrents, winter, Vol. 31, N° 4, pp. 423-432. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24458473
Kirk, C. A. (2008). Critical Companion to Flannery O’Connor. Infobase Publishing.
O’Connor, F. (1970). Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. S. Fitzgerald & R. Fitzgerald. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
- The Complete Stories. (1971). Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Renner, S. (1982). “Secular Meaning in ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’”. College Literature, Spring, Vol. 9, N° 2, pp. 123-132. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25111435
Rohman, Ch. (2014). “Awful Mystery: Flannery O’Connor as Gothic Artist”. In Crow, Ch. (ed.), A Companion to the American Gothic. John Wiley and Sons Ltd., pp. 279-290.
Whitt, M. E. (1997). Understanding Flannery O’Connor. University of South Carolina Press.
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