275 research outputs found
Cormac Mccarthy and the Writing of American Spaces
No full textIn Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Andrew Estes examines ideas about the land as they emerge in the later fiction of this important contemporary author. McCarthy's texts are shown to be part of larger narratives about American environments. Against the backdrop of the emerging discipline of environmental criticism, Estes investigates the way space has been constructed in U.S. American writing. Cormac McCarthy is found to be heir to diametrically opposed concepts of space: as something Americans embraced as either overwhelmingly positive and reinvigorating or as rather negative and threatening. McCarthy's texts both replicate this binary thinking about American environments and challenge readers to reconceive traditional ways of seeing space. Breaking new ground as to how literary landscapes and spaces are critically assessed this study seeks to examine the many detailed descriptions of the physical world in McCarthy on their own terms. Adding to so-called 'second wave' environmental criticism, it reaches beyond an earlier, limited understanding of the environment as 'nature' to consider both natural landscapes and built environments. Chapter one discusses the field of environmental criticism in reference to McCarthy while chapter two offers a brief narrative of conceptions of space in the U.S. Chapter three highlights trends in McCarthy criticism. Chapters four through eight provide close readings of McCarthy's later novels, from Blood Meridian to The Road.Intro -- Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Environmental Criticism and Cormac McCarthy -- 1.1. Environmental Criticism/Ecocriticism -- 1.2. Machine/Garden -- 1.3. Nature/Culture -- 1.4. Biocentrism/Anthropocentrism -- 1.5. Space/Place -- 1.6. Wilderness/Civilization -- 2. A Debate in American Literature: The Nature of U.S. Spaces -- 2.1. Columbus and the Edenic Trend -- 2.2. From the Best of Places to the Worst of Places -- 2.3. Vespucci and the Demonic Trend -- 2.4. "The Greatest Fact": Buffon, De Pauw and Raynal -- 2.5. The Puritans -- 2.6. Hawthorne -- 2.7. Later Manifestations of the Positive View: Crèvecoeur -- 2.8. Jefferson: "The Cultivators of the Earth Are the Most Virtuous Citizens -- 2.9. Emerson -- 2.10. Frederick Jackson Turner -- 2.11. The Dialectic of American Spaces -- 3. McCarthy Criticism -- 3.1. McCarthy as Author: Beginnings of Secondary Literature -- 3.2. Close Readings of Important Secondary Literature -- 3.2.1. John Wegner on The Border Trilogy -- 3.2.2. K. Wesley Berry on The Orchard Keeper -- 3.2.3. John Cant on The Road -- 3.2.4. The Position of the Present Study in Reference to Berry and Cant -- 3.2.5. Georg Guillemin's Ecopastoralism -- 3.2.6. Sara L. Spurgeon on Blood Meridian -- 4. Blood Meridian -- 4.1. The Environment in Blood Meridian -- 4.2. Judge Holden's View -- 4.3. The Consequences of Judge Holden's View: A Changing Environment -- 4.4. Optical Democracy -- 5. All the Pretty Horses -- 5.1. From the World of Blood Meridian to That of All the Pretty Horses -- 5.2. Space According to the Edenic Trend -- 5.3. Two Pictures of Horses: A Developing Notion of Wilderness -- 5.4. Space According to the Demonic Trend -- 5.5. Evil in Texas Versus Evil in Mexico -- 5.6. A Definition of Country in McCarthy -- 5.7. A New Way Forward -- 6. The Crossing6.1. Borders -- 6.2. New Country -- 6.3. Language and the Land -- 6.4. The Trinity Test -- 7. No Country for Old Men -- 8. The Road -- 8.1. Apocalypse in American Literature -- 8.2. Environmental Criticism and (Post-)Apocalypse -- 8.3. A Close Reading of The Road: Ideas of the Natural and Technology -- 8.3.1. Technology is Always Culturally Embedded -- 8.3.2. Nature as a Cultural Construct -- 8.3.3. Good Guys Versus Bad Guys -- 8.4. Rock City -- 8.5. The End of The Road: Biocentric Maps -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- IndexIn Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Andrew Estes examines ideas about the land as they emerge in the later fiction of this important contemporary author. McCarthy's texts are shown to be part of larger narratives about American environments. Against the backdrop of the emerging discipline of environmental criticism, Estes investigates the way space has been constructed in U.S. American writing. Cormac McCarthy is found to be heir to diametrically opposed concepts of space: as something Americans embraced as either overwhelmingly positive and reinvigorating or as rather negative and threatening. McCarthy's texts both replicate this binary thinking about American environments and challenge readers to reconceive traditional ways of seeing space. Breaking new ground as to how literary landscapes and spaces are critically assessed this study seeks to examine the many detailed descriptions of the physical world in McCarthy on their own terms. Adding to so-called 'second wave' environmental criticism, it reaches beyond an earlier, limited understanding of the environment as 'nature' to consider both natural landscapes and built environments. Chapter one discusses the field of environmental criticism in reference to McCarthy while chapter two offers a brief narrative of conceptions of space in the U.S. Chapter three highlights trends in McCarthy criticism. Chapters four through eight provide close readings of McCarthy's later novels, from Blood Meridian to The Road.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries
Cormac McCarthy’s literary evolution editors, agents, and the crafting of a prolific American author
No full textIn Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, Daniel Robert King traces McCarthy’s journey from cult figure to literary icon. Drawing extensively on McCarthy’s papers and those of Albert Erskine, his editor and devoted advocate at Random House, as well as the latest in McCarthy scholarship, King investigates the changes that McCarthy’s work as a novelist, his writing methods, and the reception of his novels have undergone over the course of his career. Taking several of McCarthy’s major novels as case studies, King explores the lengthy process of their composition through multiple drafts and revisions, the signal contributions of the author’s agents and publishers, and McCarthy’s growing confidence as a writer who is strongly attentive to tone and repeated metaphors and images. This work also reveals the wide range of McCarthy’s reading and research, especially of historical and scientific materials, as well as key intertextual connections between the novels
Prospects for the Study of Cormac McCarthy
No full textABSTRACT
Cormac McCarthy studies is currently a vibrant and active field of inquiry that came along late in his career. A small group of scholars associated with the Cormac McCarthy Society and The Cormac McCarthy Journal initiated study of his novels in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Presently, particularly after the publication of the National Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses in 1992, a new critical tradition has expanded, producing a number of essay collections and single-author books. These studies have dealt with a range of topics, from religious and philosophical inquiries to narratological analyses, and few of these topics have been exhausted. Much remains to be done. The topic of McCarthy's religio-philosophical concerns is broad and deep and invites further inquiry. In addition, influence and innovation, sociopolitical concerns, transnational and transcultural study, and ecocritical issues invite attention. These and other critical areas will advance in valuable ways our understanding of this important contemporary author.</jats:p
Nature in Cormac McCarthy's Novels
No full textThe aim of this thesis is to examine the topic of nature in novelistic oeuvre of American author Cormac McCarthy. This thesis pursues all ten novels, which are divided into three sections according to the region they are associated with. Ecocriticism was chosen as an approach; therefore, the first chapter deals with a short introduction to this interdisciplinary field. The aim of this thesis is to prove that the nature is a core aspect in Cormac McCarthy's novels, the significance of which lays both in description of American spaces and an ecological appeal on transformation of the anthropocentric perspective on the environment
King, Daniel Robert, Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author
No full textKing, Daniel Robert, Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2016. Pp. 232. ISBN: 9781621902478 Thomas Mantzaris Cormac McCarthy’s literary achievements have granted him a position among the greatest living American authors of our times. Marked by a distinctive style and double-edged realities, his literary works have constituted seminal points in the development of American literary..
Thinking with Cormac McCarthy
No full textThis brief essay honor the recently deceased American author Cormac McCarthy by interpreting a short scene from one of his screenplays as a modern instance of genuinely tragic understanding. This interpretation is compared on the one hand with a related yet comedic version of tragic knowledge, and on the other hand with the play "Oedipus the King" by Sophocles. The essay argues that fostering the presentiment of such tragic understanding might be a an effective way of motivating people to act to avert climate change
Crossing the Mexican-American Border in Cormac McCarthy's Work
No full textThe thesis initially focuses on the origin and history of Mexican-American border, especially in the state of Texas, and its current situation. Cormac McCarthy is introduced as an author Mexican-American borderlands. Explanations of the terminology behind borderlands, border, and La Frontera from the literary point of view is given in the thesis core. Space of border in literature is explained trough works of Cormac McCarthy, namely through the Border Trilogy. The thesis also consists of chapter dedicated to the novel The Road from aspects of its space description
Thinking with Cormac McCarthy
No full textThis brief essay honor the recently deceased American author Cormac McCarthy by interpreting a short scene from one of his screenplays as a modern instance of genuinely tragic understanding. This interpretation is compared on the one hand with a related yet comedic version of tragic knowledge, and on the other hand with the play "Oedipus the King" by Sophocles. The essay argues that fostering the presentiment of such tragic understanding might be a an effective way of motivating people to act to avert climate change
Cormac McCarthy's Poetics of Craftsmanship: Collaborating with Medical Advisers in the Writing of The Crossing
No full text“The work is everything,” says Ben, the main character of McCarthy’s play The Stonemason, summing up his grandfather Papaw’s view of the craft of the stonemason as the ground of beauty, justice, and truth. Judging from McCarthy’s inclination to indulge in extended descriptions of all sorts of labors and crafts he must, at least in part, agree with his character. As has been noted elsewhere, craftsmanship is a privileged theme in Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre, and the available archival material proves that the author has always been meticulous in gathering information about the crafts he has set himself to describe, undertaking extensive bibliographical research in all technical aspects and at times seeking help from specialist advisers. Relying on some manuscripts and letters held at the Wittliff Collections in San Marcos, Texas, this article investigates the way McCarthy collaborated with two specialist medical advisers, Dr. Oren Ellis and Dr. Barry King, in the writing of a scene of his novel The Crossing. The intention is to provide insight into McCarthy’s creative process and to further understand the way descriptions of crafts integrate within his overall poetics in what can be defined as an attempt to oversaturate the representation of reality
THERE WILL BE BLOOD: UMA ANÁLISE DA VIOLÊNCIA EM MERIDIANO DE SANGUE, DE CORMAC MCCARTHY
No full textThis research analyzes the novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985), by the US author Cormac McCarthy. The general aim of this paper is to analyze the theme of violence in the so-called “civilizing process” of expansion of the western frontier between United States and Mexico through the book of Cormac McCarthy. A study about the Frontier and the West is necessary, as these words have a symbolic meaning for the US people mind. With this we will analyze and confront conservative theoretical postulates about the West and its new history (New Western History). Reporting to the novel, Cormac McCarthy presents the violence of a group of mercenaries, mostly Anglo Saxons, hired to do ethnic cleansing in the frontier region between United States and Mexico, as they marched west. To conduct this discussion, it will be considered theoretical postulates from Frederick Jackson Turner (2004) and his conservative view of the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick (1987;1994) with regard to the New Western History.Esta pesquisa analisa o romance Meridiano de sangue ou O rubor crepuscular no Oeste (1985), do escritor estadunidense Cormac McCarthy. O objetivo geral deste trabalho é analisar o tema da violência no chamado “processo civilizatório” de expansão da fronteira Oeste dos Estados Unidos através da obra de Cormac McCarthy. Um estudo sobre a Fronteira e o Oeste Americano fazem-se necessários, pois estas palavras possuem um significado bastante simbólico para o imaginário estadunidense. Com isso, analisaremos e confrontaremos os postulados teóricos conservadores sobre Oeste com a sua nova história (New Western History). Reportando-nos ao romance, Cormac McCarthy apresenta a violência de um grupo de mercenários, na sua maioria anglo-saxônicos, contratados para fazer limpeza étnica na região de fronteira entre Estados Unidos e México, conforme marchavam pelo Oeste no século XIX. Para conduzir essa discussão, considerarei postulados teóricos de Frederick Jackson Turner (2004) e sua visão conservadora sobre o Oeste Americano, Patricia Nelson Limerick (1987; 1994) no que tange a nova história do Oeste
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