.........................................................................................................................ii

/pdf/intimate-fictions-the-rhetorical-strategies-of-obscene-3vm35t1nmc.pdf

Intimate Fictions: The Rhetorical Strategies of Obscene Violence in Four Novels

Georg Guillemin's visionary approach to the work of Western novelist Cormac McCarthy combines an overall survey of McCarthy's eight novels in print with a comprehensive analysis of the author's evolving ecopastoralism. Using in-depth textual interpretations, Guillemin argues that even McCarthy's early work is characterized less by traditional nostalgia for a lost pastoral order than by a radically egalitarian land ethic that prefigures today's ecopastoral tendencies in Western American writing. The study shows that more than any of the other landscapes evoked by McCarthy, the Southwestern desert becomes the stage for his dramatizations of a wild sense of the pastoral. McCarthy's fourth novel, Suttree, which is the only one set in an urban environment, is used in the introductory chapter to discuss the relevant compositional aspects of his fiction and the methodology of the chapters to come. The main part of the study devotes chapters to McCarthy's Southern novels, his keystone work Blood Meridian, and the Western novels known as the Border Trilogy. The concluding chapter discusses the broader context of American pastoralism and suggests that McCarthy's ecopastoralism is animistic rather than environmentalist in character. Increasingly, man ceases to be the dominant focus of narration, so that the shift from an egocentric to an ecocentric sense of self marks both the heroes and the narrators of McCarthy's novels.

Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy

Whale, Bear, And Man: The Demythologization Of The Hunter-Hero In American Literature

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) resists or problematizes many of the literary categories that frequently organize our reading: modern or postmodern, Western novel or Southern novel, national allegory or historical metafiction or apocalyptic thriller. I propose an alternative to such categories of genre, movement, or literary genealogy—reading the novel as a self-conscious, narrative working-through of a literary-philosophical problem. The concept that Blood Meridian continually circles without fully resolving, I suggest, is a problematic ontology of violence, problematic because it appears to assert both the utter contingency of human existence and the absolute self-determination of human will. Historicist, aesthetic, or political readings of the novel that fail to address this problem will always be unsatisfactory. I offer what I call a speculative reading which moves this problem to the center of the text, and examines the text’s attempts to resolve it.

Kurt Cavender

Papers

Our Knowing Compelled to Go Back: Speculative Misreading and the Identity of Blood Meridian