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 (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University. / Tyepscript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Katherine R. Nelson. Dissertation Committee: Frederick D. Kershner, Jr. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-250).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1962. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 346-349).

This thesis explores the evolution of American Western narrative after the 1893 closing of the Western Frontier. Formerly representing a seemingly limitless fuel of symbolic growth, the frontier's closing threatened further national prosperity. Without new Western lands to conquer, narratives about the West began to be romanticized in a new way, selectively omitting non-Anglo narrative elements and presenting a more palatable West in the form of celebratory conquest. Ignoring its imperial roots, this new twentieth-century mythologization of the West became an increasingly ubiquitous narrative of America's honorable origins. Despite its ties to the perpetuation of empire, the pervasiveness of contemporary Western narratives remains largely benign in resonance, resulting in a past that is wholly severed from the present. Using a New Historicist approach, this study pairs literary works with cultural artifacts, tracking the role of Western narrative in the furtherance of empire. The first chapter examines Frederick J. Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) as representatives of the new romanticization of the West. Chapter two looks at how Willa Cather's anti-spectacle novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), responds to the spectacle of Empire at early twentieth-century World's Fairs. The final chapter pairs Japanese-American Internment during World War II with Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (1992), as a commentary on the oppressive rhetoric of western space.

Résumé en français : Ce projet s’intéresse à la fois aux œuvres et à la théorie de l’écrivain-artiste Tom McCarthy, précisément en analysant ses livres Remainder (2005), Men in Space (2007), C (2010), et Satin Island (2015), ainsi que ses œuvres théoriques, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006) et Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish : Essays (2017). Son rapport avec certains styles littéraires d’avant-garde et de modernisme a provoqué des analyses qui l’ont rendu explicit à travers les accueils critiques au sein de et en dehors du monde universitaire, et également a travers ses propres œuvres de théorie. Toutefois, cette analyse de McCarthy prend comme point de vue l’angle de Jean Baudrillard et son regard postmoderne et critique culturel. On a suggéré que les œuvres de McCarthy rejettent le sujet traditionnel du roman moderne et de ce fait éviter les résolutions de l’ordre idéologique ou structurelle, ce qui permet l’émergence de nouvelles façons subjectives. C’est l’affirmation de ce travail que l’éthique et l’esthétique du choix de McCarthy, le refus et l’absence du sujet, sont en fait des expressions d’une positivité et passivité relevant de leurs origines d’une idéologie qui est purement bourgeoise. La première partie s’engage à explorer les conditions du temps, de l’espace, et du destin individuel dans les romans, afin de les lier aux conditions postmodernes. Ces conditions-ci facilitent l’analyse, dans la deuxième partie de ce mémoire, d’une série des styles littéraires et « formalisms », ce qui simule la présence d’un sujet « absent » dans les romans. Avec un regard visé sur la notion de Symbolisme, de l’« a-signification » et de la mélancolie en tant que repère littéraire d’une subjectivité absente, cette deuxième partie élabore l’esthétique de l’absence (d’un perspectif linguistique et technologique), développant l’essentiel de la notion d’une présence simulée. La troisième partie réunit, a travers l’ironie et le personnage mythique du farceur, les conditions et l’esthétique de ce sujet absent sous la formed’une vision d’éthique cyclique, plutôt qu’infini ou discriminatoire, et c’est cette éthique qui produit à la fois la capacite d’un défi mortel et le plaisir de la conformité en même temps.Mots-clés en français : Tom McCarthy, roman, Baudrillard, éthique, esthétique, communication de masse, le postmoderne, absence / Résumé en anglais : This study engages with the novels and theory of the English author and artist Tom McCarthy, specifically the novels Remainder (2005), Men in Space (2007), C (2010) and Satin Island (2015), as well as his works of theory, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006) and Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays (2017). McCarthy’s literary connection to certain brands of avant-garde modernism has been analysed and made explicit both through their critical reception inside and outside of academia, and through McCarthy’s own works of theory. However, in this study McCarthy’s literary oeuvre is engaged with through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s particular brand of postmodernity and cultural criticism. It has been suggested that McCarthy’s novels reject the traditional subject of the modern novel, and as such avoid turning to ideological or structural resolutions, leaving open the space for new modes of subjectivity to emerge. It is the contention of this study that the ethics and aesthetics of this refusal and absence are in fact expressions of a specifically bourgeois ideological positivity and passivity. The first section serves to approach the conditions of time, space and individual destiny in the novels, relating these to the conditions of postmodernity. These conditions serve to foster, in the second section of the study, a series of literary modes and formalisms that simulate the presence of the ‘absent subject’ in the novels. Looking specifically at Symbolism, a-signification and melancholy as literary markers of an absent subjectivity, this second section elaborates on the aesthetics of absence (linguistic and technological) that are essential to this mode of simulated presence. The third section brings together, through the figure of irony and the mythic trickster figure, the conditions and aesthetics of this absent subject in the form of a mode of ethics that is cyclical, as opposed to infinite or discriminatory, and which produces both the capacity for fatal challenge and the pleasure of conformity at once.Mots-clés en anglais: Tom McCarthy, the novel, Baudrillard, ethics, aesthetics, mass communication, postmodernity, absence.

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).

This study examines Mary McCarthy's three major female-protagonist works of fiction--The Company She Keeps (1942), A Charmed Life (1955), and The Group (1963)--in terms of the author's attitude towards femaleness. It confronts Elizabeth Janeway's assessment in Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (1979) that McCarthy's works need not be reviewed in a survey essay on "Women's Literature" because they are "essentially masculine even if not conventionally so" (345). The thesis is that McCarthy's fiction receives a pattern of criticism faulting its lack of imagination and its inability to create "living" characters precisely because she maintained a high degree of self-censorship and control over parts of her awareness that were not male-identified. She was not free to imagine in areas that might unleash the horrors beneath what Norman Mailer has called "the thin juiceless crust" upon which McCarthy's "nice girls" live their lives.Each novel finds the protagonist at a different stage of modern womanhood and using a variety of male-identified responses. Meg Sargent of Company is a young New York sophisticate dealing with divorce, employment, travel, social life, political activism, casual sexual encounters, and the resolution of childhood trauma through psychoanalysis. Martha Sinnott of Charmed is a married woman returning with her second husband to the bohemian artists' community of her first husband in order to resolve the conflict of literary mentorship and patriarchal dominance that had marked the old relationship. In The Group Kay Strong and eight other Vassar Class of '33 females serve as literary embodiments of the social ailment that Betty Friedan cited in her 1963 polemic, The Feminine Mystique.McCarthy's three autobiographies--Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), How I Grew (1985), and Intellectual Memoirs (1992)--illuminate many reasons for and consequences of her male-identified approach to living and writing. Social context for such a fate stems in part from having come of age in the 1930s, being a member of what Elaine Showalter refers to as "The Other Lost Generation." McCarthy's texts provide literary illustration of a common response to patriarchy. / Department of English