The Language of Grace: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch

by Peter S. Hawkins

Book by Peter S. Hawkins, Flannery O'Connor, Iris Murdoch, Walker Percy

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Professor Hawkins’ work has long centered on Dante, most recently in Dante’s Testaments: Essays on Scriptural Imagination (winner of a 2001 AAR Book Prize), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections (2001), co-edited with Rachel Jacoff, and Dante: A Brief History (2006). The poet features as well in his expansion of his 2007 Beecher Lectures on Preaching in Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009). His research in the history of biblical reception has led to three co-edited volumes to which he also contributed essays, Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs (2006), Medieval Readings of Romans (2007), and From the Margin I: Women of the Hebrew Bible and their Afterlives (2009). Together with Paula Carlson he has edited the Augsburg Fortress four-volume series, Listening for God: Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith. He has also written on twentieth-century fiction (The Language of Grace), utopia (Getting Nowhere), and the language of ineffability (Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett). Professor Hawkins’ essays have dealt with such topics as memory and memorials, televangelism, scriptural interpretation, and preaching. He writes regularly for The Christian Century’s ”Living by the Word” column and has work forthcoming in Religion and Literature, Modern Language Notes and The Yale Review. From 2000 to 2008 he directed the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University. While at BU he won the Metcalf Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He has served on the editorial boards of PMLA and Christianity and Literature and on the selection committee both of the Luce Fellows in Theology and of the Dante Society of America.

Reviews

[CuriousBookReviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curiosity level: From excited to HMMM to OK
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"The teller of the parable always runs the risk of not being understood in full or even at all, no matter how many clues are left on the way... this places a premium on the freedom of the reader to come to an interpretive decision of his or her own, that is, to discover the transforming depth of the story - or not." - p.17
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Hawkins place three "grace writers" under a microscope to investigate their strategies of writing with the "language of grace"
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If you've heard of Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy or Iris Murdoch, you will notice a common thread in their works: always present is a literary dance/tension between the characters' lives that are lived as a gift and lives that are lived without.
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Lots of spoilers though, if you haven't read any of the above three writers' works.
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Through this book, we see how their parables egg us in no specific direction (thus "grace") but open our eyes to possibilities we have never considered before.
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Suitable for: Writers who love parables, Christian writers 📖