Grace as a Formal Turning Point: Computational Detection in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction

This paper operationalizes Flannery O'Connor's theological concept of "the moment of grace" as a narratologically detectable turning point. We propose a formal definition of grace-typed turning points as discourse spans exhibiting both epistemic rupture and action-alternative visibility, drawing on O'Connor's own critical writings, later criticism, and narratological theory. Working with twelve short stories, we develop an annotation protocol at the paragraph level and evaluate computational detection methods. Our cross-validated grace-aware model incorporating position weighting, enhanced vocabulary detection, cross-story phrase cues, and window smoothing achieves 75\% Hit@1 in leave-one-out evaluation; an exploratory story-specific phrase condition reaches 100\% on the full corpus. The cross-validated success demonstrates that O'Connor's grace moments share a transferable linguistic signature: recognition, violence, body/incarnation, and spiritual vocabulary combine in characteristic ways across her corpus. We argue this success illustrates a productive workflow for digital humanities: build interpretable baselines, analyze failures, incorporate domain knowledge, and validate through cross-validation.