Thoughts on my Junior Project

As an English major at Princeton, I’ve got to write two Junior Project’s or JP’s, one for each semester. They comprise a massive research paper of 20 pages on the topic of our choice. I’ve been hard at work doing the research for my JP all semester, and I thought you might be interested to hear about it, considering how it’s very much related to books, literature, and the like. So:

I’m writing on the element of the grotesque in the short stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. For those of you who don’t know, these two are women short story writers of the South, and contemporaries. They always write about the South, and in an intriguingly dark and brutal way. Characters in O’Connor’s stories in particular have a way of dying by violence, either getting crushed by tractors, being in car accidents, getting gored by bulls or shot by escaped convicts. Welty’s stories are somewhat more subdued, but they still have the grotesque, particularly in the bodies of her female characters. Characters are often repulsive in Welty’s stories, either insane, shrill, and witch-like, or grossly obese, somehow hideously rendered with all the uglinesses of the human body. I’m arguing that the South’s dark past comes out as the grotesque in these stories as a kind of critique of the society, but also as a general comment on what happens to people who discriminate based on race or gender. Not only the people who are victimized become grotesque and dehumanized, but the victimizers themselves becomes repulsive to the reader. Discrimination is therefore a dehumanizing process for both the victim and victimizer.

I’m very interested in my topic and the stories are gems of fiction; I highly encourage you to read Flannery O’Connor’s most famous story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, along with any story by Eudora Welty — she is particularly subtle and haunting. I’ll keep you updated about the ongoing JP process as well, as it’s a challenging and very stimulating project to have to do. At this stage, I haven’t written a word of the actual paper; I’m reading a ton of literary criticism on these two authors and thinking about framing my own argument. Soon, however, I’ll have to start writing actual paragraphs of this mammoth project, and that’s when it should start getting interesting.