On Regional Writing, by Flannery O'Connor

The best American fiction has always been regional. The ascendancy passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed to and stayed longest wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light. In these things the South still has a degree of advantage. It is a slight degree and getting slighter, but it is a degree of kind as well as of intensity, and it is enough to feed good literature if our people - whether they be newcomers or have roots here - are enough aware of it to foster its growth in themselves.
Every serious writer will put his finger on it at a slightly different spot but in the same region of sensitivity. When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, "Because we lost the War." He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence - as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of the country.
Not every lost war would have this effect on every society, but we were doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having means to interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening it at every point, has been another history. Mencken called the South the Bible Belt, in scorn and thus in incredible innocence. In the South we have, in however attenuated form a form, a vision of Moses' face as he pulverized our idols. This knowledge is what makes the Georgia writer different from the writer from Hollywood or New York. It is the knowledge that the novelist finds in his community. When he ceases to find it there, he will cease to write, or at least he will cease to write anything enduring. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

From "The Regional Writer" in Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 58-59.

Really Done!

I just received word that my manuscript has been accepted by Clemson. That officially ends the process of writing my masters thesis. My degree will be awarded on December 18 and I'll go down on the 19th to pick it up. This has been a very long and tiresome project, but looking back on it, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. There were some late nights and a few personal days from work, but nothing that really killed me.
Now I get to pay more attention to my classes at school and read what I want to read. Which is not to say I won't be reading Donald Davidson any more. I have some of his stuff still that I'd like to pay more attention to than I could during the thesis writing phase. Not to mention the other Agrarians that I hardly touched at all.
I'll post a picture of my diploma when I get it.

Step Two

Well, my thesis has been accepted by my adviser. That means that I now send it to the other two members of my committee and they tell me what they think about it. My adviser made lots of comments and suggestions, as the other members will, I'm sure. Once I get all their feedback, I'll make changes and then defend the corrected version of my thesis. This will all need to happen before Thanksgiving. If all goes well, I will graduate with an M.A. in History.
I am very excited about this, and very appreciative of my adviser. He really went out of his way to help me when I came to him saying I needed to graduate this semester. The other members of my committee are all men I respect as well, so I am sure their comments are going to be valuable.
I'll keep the blog posted as to what happens and how it happens.

Guess what???

Guess what this is...










It is the first completed draft of my thesis. I still don't have a title for it, but I guess I don't have to for my first draft. It ended up about 109 pages long, with the bibliography.
Now it is time to do the editing process. I have two friends looking into the grammar, which I know will be awful. My wife and I have agonized over the arrangement, and probably are not done with that yet. I am still not satisfied with my introduction.
Nonetheless, the first draft is complete.
Oh, yeah, it has to be turned in Wednesday.

Knee Deep in Research

I haven't posted anything recently because I am knee deep in research. Every once in a while, until I get a draft of my thesis, I may post something I find interesting from my research.
Here is an interesting quote from Donald Davidson...
"A civilization cannot feed and flourish upon perishable things. Only imperishable at its center can give it life. Nothing is more imperishable than poetry. In comparison, the material works of science and industry are but fleeting trifles. No civilization of the past has ever lived without poetry. Our civilization can hardly be an exception."

The Process

I have been down to Clemson University several times in the past two weeks. I have registered for my final class, a Master's Research class. I have paid for said class (Thanks, Dad!). I have spoken to advisors in the department and managed to get all the appropriate forms signed and turned in. I have raided the library more times than I'd like to think. My limit on books is 200. I'm not sure how close I am on that.

This is just one part of a bookcase. The stuff you can see is in front of my books.











I have photocopied, scanned, and printed more articles than I ever thought I would. Here are some of them on my
desk

and floor












The process is to begin to read as much as I can about Davidson and figure out what exactly I can say about him or ideas that he had that hasn't been said before. With my Senior Thesis at UTC, I did this by looking at how B.B. Warfield and Charles Hodge both used the philosophy of Thomas Reid, called Common Sense Realism. Stuff had been written on Reid, Warfield, and Hodge, but no one brought it together and said what I tried to say.
At this point I have read two biographies of Davidson, several books on the Agrarian movement, and a ton of Davidson's own writings. I am coming close to something. I can feel it. I just hope it happens before school starts. My ability to read for seven hours at a time reduces severely at that point. If I have a thesis statement by that point, however, then I have about 45 days to write at least 90 pages on my topic. If I make it to October 15 with a draft, I should be home free from there.