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Showing posts from February, 2023

The Theme of Displacement in "The Displaced Person" by Flannery O'Connor

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    I n Jose Liste's essay "Strategies of Displacement in Flannery O'Connor's 'The Displaced Person,'" Liste defines displacement as the following: "Put simply, displacement consists in the substitution of one element by another, both of which are at least remotely related, usually through similarity or contiguity. Displacement is of the realm of metaphor and metonymy. lt thus partakes of the nature of figurality and, in a literary text, manifests itself through rhetorical devices and thematic contrasts" (Liste 1). In "The Displaced Person," we see numerous examples of displacement displayed throughout the story through many different literary forms such as irony.     In "The Displaced Person," readers get an idea of what a "displaced person" is in the following excerpt: "' It means they ain’t where they were born at and there’s nowhere for them to go—like if you was run out of here and wouldn’t nobody have

Enoch Emery In Huston's Wise Blood

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Dan Shor as Enoch Emery      Wise Blood is a story with many weird characters with their own unique personality traits. But a character who made me question what I was watching was Enoch Emery. Enoch seems like a kind-hearted, lonely 18-year-old with no real direction, but there are definitely things Enoch does that the typical 18-year-old doesn't do—especially stealing a "new Jesus" from a museum. According to Susan Pressley, "Most readers are disgusted as they read about Enoch's stealing the mummy from the museum, housing it in his self-made tabernacle, and ultimately delivering it to Hazel to serve as the "new Jesus" (80) that Hazel seeks. Critics focus on this act as more evidence that Enoch is a pagan who has found a God in his own mummified and unresurrected image" (Pressley 373). "Confused" would probably be a better word than "disgusted" but the disturbing actions make sense if Enoch has realized his own spirituality. Wh