Aspects of the Grotesque

A recent ramble around the fictional corners of the interwebs brought me upon this rare recording of Flannery O'Connor speaking about the grotesque in Southern and Catholic fiction, as a preamble to her reading of "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The aesthetics of the grotesque are interesting in many ways, and I wonder sometimes how much I agree with O'Connor in this regard, but there is no doubt that she presents her ideas in a more cogent fashion than today's half-educated novelists could manage.