I have been creating presentations and teaching peace through spatializing the study of human rights, empowerment of women, emigration, migration, immigration, and diasporas.

    My writing in the area of semiotics and intertextuality continues about the cultural poetics of Zora Neale Hurston. The short story “Black Death” which pre-dates second wave feminism, is a prelude to Zora Neale Hurston’s Haitian folklore: Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). Hurston’s identity as a “literary Anthropologist” and her thematic messages rooted in folklore are based in expressions of space and language.  Zora was writing about cultural contextual clues to decipher clues about multiple strands of complexity. Imaginative literature uses often, the spirituality of the author. Zora certainly used her powerful imaginative language to speak of cultural change.

Through my own writing and imagination, I seek to prove that concentration on the art of writing is a mirror into cultural changes necessary for all humanity.

The most important outcome of poetics and social justice praxis is cultural poetics, which seeks otoidentify literary and film works as social discourses. Semiotics, the general science of signs, which traces its lineage to Saussure and the American Philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce.

My cultural landscape in the research for this chapter involved the different dimensions of Christian spirituality, and in particular Benedictine spirituality, which I relate to civic values and cultural contexts. I use interdisciplinary and hermeneutical study of traditional resources (historical) and contemporary forms of spiritual life (anthropological). My own healing and transformation occurs with readings of O’Connor during different difficult periods of my own life. But the writing of the project is secondary to the growth that I am receiving. Benedictine virtues of simplicity listening obedience and others come to be the most important aspect. The goals of the project have moved to practicing these virtues. However, through the peace that I gain by close readings of the collected works of O’Connor and Thomas Merton, I also perceive them in a new view: the 20th century modernist sages and peace activists.

Flannery O’Connor is writing about human rights through powerful language and poetics. I argue that my study of A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor indicates study of language of trauma. Page 3, the first undated entry that contains the language of the author as a “self shadow” which she says “will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon” (O’Connor 3). To understand we compare the passage to the work of Jacques Derrida in “White Mythology.”  Derrida’s passage refers to “reverse metaphorization of concepts.” The reversal is such that there can be no final separation between the linguistic-metaphorical and the philosophical realms.

     We learn the opposite of peace in the works of O’Connor. Readers feel despair. Robert R. Magliola explains that the structure of the literary experience including interpreter and interpreted as logocentric mysticism in the poetic language of Flannery O’Connor. He tells us that O’Connor utters mystery which is being. She combines the Tao and Christian theology. 

     We connect  luminaries as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King through critical hermeneutics which offers an approach that is very different from traditional hermeneutic approaches. Critical hermeneutics takes nothing for granted. In fact, it is the taken for granted nature of understanding that is the object of study and, in particular, where that knowledge comes from. Hermeneutics stops at the point of saying that knowledge and understanding is historically and socially bound. Critical hermeneutics continues where traditional hermeneutics leaves off, by embarking on an examination of those social and historical conditions which make understanding possible.    

     Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal, as a theme to investigate poetics, is based on my observances from an ongoing study of my use of grammar to form language, with evidence from observations based in life story writing, a key characteristic of the methods of field study through journaling. A case study on thought processes of my own writing juxtaposes and prepares me to create a useful pedagogy as well as life study on the power of writing for cultural change, as I interpret the poetics of O’Connor.

     Flannery O’Connor to study of language of trauma, preceded my current study of the value to O’Conner as a civil rights leader. Perhaps, Merton’s acknowledgement of the strength of O’Conner’s writing as civil rights literary textual signs. Robert R. Magliola explains that the structure of the literary experience including interpreter and interpreted as logocentric mysticism.

    O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. A devoted Catholic, she lived most of her life on a farm. She wrote 2 novels, 32 short stories, reviews, and commentaries. Her southern gothic style uses regional settings and grotesque characters. She won the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction, after her death in 1964. Catholic revival and a Catholic theory of fiction as well as Christian realism of the “here and now” and postwar America are themes that highlight our quest for understanding of O’Connor’s writing.

I’m seeking to share my writing during the pandemic that I shared with my students to inspire them.