Thesis (Ph.D.)--Baylor University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 216-221)

In Overcoming the Regional Burden: History, Tradition, and Myth in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy, I contend that McCarthy's literary aesthetic develops and changes as he moves from Tennessee to Texas. McCarthy's conspicuous Southern and Southwestern regional affiliations have led critics to expect his works to recapitulate native history, traditions, and myths. Yet, McCarthy transcends provincial regionalism by challenging the creation of the regional and national myths we confuse with our actual histories and identities. McCarthy's fictions point away from accepted histories and point instead to figures marginalized by society and myth makers. These figures, according to McCarthy, are just as much a part of the creation of myth as those figures indelibly imprinted on our consciousness by literary and historical tradition. My dissertation, in many respects, focuses on McCarthy's debunking of both literary and historical tradition, and his concomitant revitalization of American identity.

In this thesis I argue that Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian serves as a critique of the American Western mythos by collapsing aspects of myth, ideology, and the sublime into the question of violence's relationship to language. In explicating the novel, I demonstrate how the ironies staged between the character of the kid and the novel's narrator and the ironies represented in the language and characterization of Judge Holden reveal McCarthy's critique by pointing toward the violence inherent in the language of myth. Along with this discussion of myth and ideology, I also analyze how the figuring of violence as sublime in the novel gets coupled with moments where characters exhibit either an unconscious desire for language or a marked absence of language. The significance of these moments, I contend, extends McCarthy's critique of the American mythos by undermining the Western genre's trope of the stoic hero while also exposing the ways in which the novel draws together the nature of language and the nature of violence. Blood Meridian thus serves not as a libratory revisionist critique that seeks to re-write the American mythos but as a much darker meditation on the ubiquity of violence—a violence that manifests itself all too often in textual form. / Graduation date: 2012

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2000. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 275-283).

Thesis (J.C.L.)--Catholic University of America, 2008. / Description based on Microfiche version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-52).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2000. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 275-283). Electronic reproduction (pdf format) available from Proquest Digital Dissertations via World Wide Web.

In this thesis, I analyse four novels by Cormac McCarthy through the lens of Apocalypse theory. Looking at his later, south-western, novels Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men and The Road, I examine to what extent they respond to biblical and secular apocalyptic ideologies and narrative tropes. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between biblical apocalypse and secular, or nihilistic, apocalypse. The former draws its framework from the Book of Revelation, and entails a war between Heaven and Hell, the rule of the Anti-Christ and God’s final judgement. Although cataclysmic, a biblical apocalypse also promises worldly renewal through the descent of New Jerusalem. Thus, the end of the world was a desirable, rather than dreaded, event. However, as the world moved into the twentieth century, and we saw modernity give birth to weapons of global destruction, apocalyptic attitudes became pessimistic. The belief that God would save the world from corruption quickly gave way to an entropic end, in which human civilisation will simply collapse into nothingness. I consider McCarthy’s south-west fiction within these opposing apocalyptic ideas, and demonstrate how the four novels build a line of history that begins with Blood Meridian’s Manifest Destiny and ends with The Road’s nuclear bomb. I argue that McCarthy explores both biblical and nihilistic apocalyptic modes before combining them in The Road, which I argue offers a new apocalyptic mode: renewal and salvation without God. Within this context, I argue against common interpretations of McCarthy as a completely nihilistic writer with no vested anthropological concerns. Through these four novels, I instead suggest he negotiates between biblical and nihilistic apocalyptic modes before coming to the conclusion, in The Road, that hope exists.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 177-187). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (J.C.L.)--Catholic University of America, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-52).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Wayne Lesser. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.