A Hundred Years of Flannery O’Connor: Re-Visiting Her Legacy
Where: Universidad Complutense de Madrid
When: October 29th – October 31st, 2025
Description: The year 2025 will mark the centennial of one of the most powerful voices in twentieth-century American Literature. Author of a reduced fictional production (two novels and three collections of short stories), Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) remains among the most widely praised authors of the United States, to the extent that, shortly after her premature death, claims by, among others, Brainard Cheney, Robert Giroux, and Caroline Gordon were made about the country having lost their next Nobel Laureate for Literature. Alternative history aside, what is true is that the last century of American literature would have lost an enormous amount of its meaning without the existence of Flannery O’Connor’s writing. Contemporary authors such as Eudora Welty (1909–2001), Alice Munro (born in 1931), Joyce Carol Oates (born in 1938), Stephen King (born in 1947), and Nick Cave (born in 1957), among others, are indebted to the brief, yet infinite universes created by O’Connor.
The aim of this conference is to commemorate Flannery O’Connor’s centennial with an academic symposium and a fresh approach to the meaning of her texts and her afterlife in today’s literature. Since the first conference held in Denmark in 1984, other European events about O’Connor have taken place in Italy, France, and Spain. Thus, the centennial is a timely opportunity to strengthen this exchange and to open new possibilities for research, teaching, and international collaboration.
Institution: Universidad Complutense de Madrid
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