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Thesis (MA)--University of Montana, 2009. / Contents viewed on November 29, 2009. Title from author supplied metadata. Includes bibliographical references.

Zugl.: Augsburg, Univ., Diss., 2008

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

This dissertation will argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy represent a sustained attack on American literature's abiding fixation with pastoral. It further argues that such a fixation is very much a national allegory, one that, paradoxically, cannot help but produce a sense of doubt lurking beneath the numerous assertions of individual and national confidence. Cormac McCarthy very much engages with the antinomies of this national allegory. His use of pastoral allegory comes in the form of a broken allegory: a strategy that is very much in keeping with Walter Benjamin's vision of allegorical fragmentation resulting from permanent historical crisis. This crisis, as McCarthy shows, reaches tipping-point in the modern era: the pastoral's dream of ‘pure-utility' is shown to be completely incompatible with the predominance of exchange value and commoditized social relations. The study is in four parts. The first section divides the first four novels in order to explore how they shatter the South's notion of uniqueness through a depiction of a desecrated pastoral. The second section considers the novel Blood Meridian on its own in order to demonstrate how the novel's absurdist renunciation of pastoral and the western mythos helps set up the late novels themes of generic and cultural termination. The third looks at the Border Trilogy, and discusses how recourse to the more open wildernesses of the south-west curiously introduces a countervailing theme of disenchantment and pastoral attenuation. The fourth and final section groups together No Country for Old Men and The Road, in order to argue that these late novels elicit a final rejection of pastoral as it collides headlong with the imaginary of late-capitalism.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of English, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-80).

Many critics have conceded that Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is an ambiguous novel; however, the very same critics have often argued also that the novel’s contradictions are eventually resolved. It will be argued in this essay that the multiplicity of McCarthy’s text primarily regards a problematic of agency—a question as to whether or not humanity is a force to be reckoned with in the world. It will also be argued that this question takes the form of a dialectic that the novel leaves unresolved, and that this, in its turn, is an important feature of the text—a feature originating from contemporary ideology, from late capitalism’s contradictory-ridden relation to the ”Real”. Blood Meridian portrays atrocities resulting from the 19th century Westward expansion of the United States unsparingly; the reader gets to witness a violent subsumption of the indigenous population, and is informed about a nascent extinction of the buffalo. The text also implicitly discusses the difficulties of representing violence and suffering aesthetically; however, Blood Meridian offers no final conclusion regarding whether or not humanity—and especially the Western World—is ultimately to blame for these phenomena. Via an unresolved dialectic of agency, then, McCarthy’s text renders history both alterable and reified, mankind both agent and powerless instrument. The following essay traces this feature to late capitalism’s exhaustion of the Earth’s resources and animal life, its Western-centric subjugation of other cultures, and its tendency to interpellate Western “man” as the centered subject of the Earth, while simultaneously liberating this subject from the responsibilities that come with such a position. It will eventually be proposed here that Blood Meridian’s contradictions is the result of a text that seeks redemption, both by an evasive attempt to write humanity back into harmony with nature, and by expressing a declaration of Western guilt.

Although scholars have widely acknowledged the prevalence of religious reference in the work of Cormac McCarthy, no studies have yet paid any adequate attention to the most pervasive religious trope in all his works: the image of sacrament, and in particular, of eucharist. I contend that a thorough and appropriately informed study of sacrament in the work of Cormac McCarthy can uniquely illuminate his whole body of writing and I undertake that study in this dissertation. Two things are obvious in the work of Cormac McCarthy: that these novels attempt to establish some sort of moral system in light of metaphysical collapse, and that they are often adorned with sacramental imagery. My argument is that these two facts can and do intelligibly speak to one another, and that a particular theological understanding of sacrament demonstrates how. By reading McCarthy alongside postmodern accounts of action, identity, subjectivity, and narration, I show how he exploits Christian theology in order to locate the value of human acts and relations in a sacramentally immanent way. This is not to claim McCarthy for theology, but it is to assert that McCarthy generates an account of what goodness might look like in a death-ridden world through reference to the theological tradition of sacrament. I begin by addressing the scope and source of McCarthy’s violence. In Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men I read McCarthy as following Nietzsche in scorning an ascetic ideal that locates the value of life beyond life. The ideas of reason and fate in Nietzsche as they develop in Adorno and Arendt is then studied in these same novels. Arendtian ideas of action deeply influence my reading of Suttree next, and this lead into a study of storytelling in the three novels of the border trilogy which is again deeply indebted to Arendtian notions of narration. Last, I look to contemporary theology and The Road for examples of sacrament that can cohere these various themes under a single sign and establish the grounds for a postmodern morality.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Texas A & M University, 2003. / "May 2003." Title taken from PDF title screen (viewed October 22, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-184).