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.

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

Scholars attuned to the mystical content in Cormac McCarthy’s novels focus primarily on what potential religious conclusions might be drawn from them. This dissertation argues that McCarthy’s prose, approached as stylized performances of linguistic failure, performs something quite different than what the scholarly assessments claim. Rather than mining McCarthy’s novels for indirect forms of religious affirmation, this project proposes a distinctive approach to McCarthy’s work: a narrative apophatic mysticism. Attention to the non-assertive character of apophasis or “un-saying” reveals that McCarthy’s philosophical and religious allusions perform their own collapse. In the tradition of apophatic mysticism, the novels represent an ordered failure of representation that indicates toward transcendence without rendering it explicitly. The result is the fictional production of indicative signs that keep assertions and information in suspense while gesturing toward the ineffable. Adapting interpretive approaches from Michael Sells and Charles Peirce, this dissertation approaches McCarthy’s novels by means of five rhetorical categories based on mystical traditions represented by Pseudo-Dionysius, Hadewijch, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, as well as work by Elaine Scarry and Bernard McGinn. These interpretive rhetorical categories are 1) the broken references of names; 2) the logic of ontological grounds; 3) the collapse of conceptual space; 4) potential infinite capacity of bodily pain; and finally, 5) the explicit argumentative tension within the novels generated by the other four categories. Through the repetitive use of apophatic themes over several texts, McCarthy’s novels simultaneously erode assertions about the nature of fate, justice, and being, indicating that the final truth of these important concepts is not reduceable to linguistic expression or artifice. By adapting apophatic literary techniques of religious and philosophical traditions referenced in his texts, McCarthy incubates within fiction an ancient mode of rhetoric meant to orient the reader toward ineffable truths, offering narrative apophasis as a form of imaginative spiritual exercise.

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

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This thesis examines the links between and intersections of violence and subjectivity in a comparative, transatlantic and transnational study of the fiction of four recognized international authors, namely, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, J. M. Coetzee, and Yvonne Vera. Despite their differing geographical, temporal, cultural and socio-political situations and situatedness, these writers’ common, thematic concerns with taboo topics of violence such as rape, incest, infanticide and necrophilia, situate violence as a constitutive, intimate and intricate part of subjectivity. In providing varied, and not unproblematic, renderings of the mutuality of violence and subjectivity, their novels do not just reveal the ambiguous and ambivalent character and the fragile and tenuous processes of (exercising and asserting) subjectivity; their fiction enacts and engenders its own kind of textual violence that reflects and refracts the (metaphysical and epistemological) violence of the subjective process. Raising crucial questions about the place, role and efficacy of literature in articulating violence and subjectivity, this thesis argues that violence is meaningful to and constitutive of the subjective process in these authors’ works that offer an experiential, lived appreciation of subjectivity. Providing an historical and socio-political contextualization of the novels, the thesis maintains that these authors’ specific interpretations of violence in their fiction necessarily interrogates and reconfigures questions of race and culture, gender and sexuality, as well as morality; that is, it reexamines and repositions conventional interpretations of being and belonging, of subjectivity in general. In this way, their fiction reveals literature’s ability not merely to disprove theory but, through its very textuality, extend and enhance it to reflect the materiality of being.

M.A. / Even at a superficial glance there seems to be remarkable similarities between the "Border trilogy" of the American author Cormac McCarthy and the work of the Afrikaans author Alexander Strachan. The last three novels by McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1999), are referred to as the "Border trilogy". The first three novels by Strachan are also sometimes referred to as a "trilogy". Frontiers/borders are important in the novels under discussion: The Crossing (1994), Die jakkalsjagter (1990) and Die werfbobbejaan (1994). The Crossing is the second novel of the 'Border trilogy". The title of Strachan's fist work is 'n Wereld sonder grense ("A world without borders"). In The Crossing tracking a wolf plays an important role while Die jakkalsjagter is about hunting a jackal. Die werfbobbejaan is about hunting down a baboon. Both McCarthy's and Strachan's works have been compared to the Western (films/novels dealing with the cowboys of North America). These superficial similarities seem to invite further comparison. The following themes are present in both authors' works and are compared in this study: The world can never be known The world is incomprehensible. It is constantly changing and always out of reach. The world is like "a snowflake" and like "breath" and cannot be held, because it only exists in people's hearts. The world is also incomprehensible in Strachan's work, because all certainties are undermined. Khera cannot understand Zuhiland in the same "logical" way that she could understand her world in Cape Town. The strange stories told by the people in Zululand (izinganekwane) make her aware of supernatural powers. Nothing can really be known about the world. The story that the witness tells becomes the world All objects are without meaning unless their stories are known. Truth is only to be found in narration. The world exists in narration. Therefore "the witness is all". Free will and predetermination The view of the world and our destiny in the world in The Crossing is compared with the view of the world in Die jakkalsjagter and Die werfbobbejaan. There is not one final answer to the question of determinism and free will in The Crossing. On the one hand it seems that history happens according to a predetermined plan of God. On the other hand it seems that human beings can make decisions and be in control. In this novel we find the idea that the future and the past can only be known as it exists in the present. The Strachan novels, Die jakkalsjagter en Die werfbobbejaan, reflect a certain determinism. Everything heads towards a final showdown with the death of the old man in the sod house. Khera's actions are predetermined. Things happen without her intention. The importance of stories is found in all three novels under discussion, The Crossing, Die jakkalsjagter and Die werfbobbejaan. "Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place" (Crossing: 142-143). The importance of the story is that it gives meaning to the things. All stories are the same story. The izinganekwane could be parallelled to the corrido (Spanish tales). Both are part of a hostile country, a different language and both are old tales that seem to determine the future.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 239-250). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3024517.

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