In this paper, I argue that novels of the same genre may communicate with each other, spanning time and space to recontextualize the realities of books that both preceeded and came after one another. I use Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) and Hernan Diaz' In the Distance (2018) to illustrate my theory, focusing on the issues of masculinity presentet in both novels. While In the Distance cannot rectify the issues reader may have with Blood Meridian, the connections they share may assist in "filling in the blanks".

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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.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Dante's the Inferno contain textual and thematic comparisons. While the Inferno creates a world that exhibits the worst fears of the medieval Catholic subconscious of Dante's time, The Road paints a world of the darkest fears of the current American subconscious. Both texts reflect a critical dystopia that speculates on human spirituality and offers a critique of society through a tour of sin and suffering in a desolate setting.

There are many textual and thematic similarities between Dante’s Inferno and Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. There are also significant textual similarities between the New Testament and McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God. Juxtaposing Outer Dark and Child of God to Inferno and the New Testament, respectively, suggests a common trope that redemption requires characters’ name and repent of sin.

Since the 1970s, the work of Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b. 1945) has included live performance, video, sculpture, kinetic tableaux, and installation. Tracing the development of McCarthy’s work between 1974 and 2013, I undertake a critical discussion of the development of performance in relation to visual art practices. Using one artist’s work as a guide through a number of key discussions in the history of performance art, I argue that performance has influenced every aspect of McCarthy’s artistic practice, and continues to inform critical readings of his work. My thesis follows the trajectory of McCarthy’s performance practice as it has developed through different contexts. I begin with the early documentation and dissemination of performance in the Los Angeles-based magazine High Performance (1978-83), which established a context for the reception of performance art, and for McCarthy’s early work. I then examine specific examples of McCarthy’s practice in relation to his critical reception: live performances and videos from the 1970s are discussed alongside critical readings of his work influenced by psychoanalysis; and the wider public recognition of McCarthy’s object-based art in the 1980s and early 1990s. I then look more broadly at the recent trend of re-enacting historical performances in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time project (2011-12), as a mode of engaging with performance history and exploring how histories of ephemeral art are re-iterated over time. Finally, I discuss a number of McCarthy’s recent exhibitions and installations that mobilises a wider consideration of the histories of performance and ephemeral practices in art institutions. McCarthy’s work is firmly established in the art world, and I argue that his work also provides a significant touchstone for histories of performance. I look historically at how McCarthy’s work has been documented, disseminated, curated, and re-performed, and open wider discussions about ways of engaging with performance history. In turn, I complicate the relationship between performance and the art world; between ephemeral art and object-based art practices; and between scholarly engagements with performance history, and the public presentation of performance in curatorial practices and institutional contexts.

Constitutive rhetoric theory posits that community identity is rhetorically created. There are various approaches to constitutive rhetoric, though most rhetoricians have chosen to focus on the works of Maurice Charland and Michael McGee, whose approaches focus on audience so much that often the rhetor has no agency. This project blends their ideas with those of James Boyd White to create works of criticism that highlight an increased amount of agency for the rhetor. As examples, I have chosen four case studies from the year 1954: the Brown v. Board decision, the Army-McCarthy hearing (specifically McCarthy's heated exchange with Joe Welch), the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the first article in the first dated issue of Playboy. Each chapter is designed to provide an example of what a constitutive analysis in the style of White would look like. The project begins with a description of the theories and analyses, including constitutive rhetoric, postmodernism, and textual analysis. The Brown v. Board analysis begins with a brief history of the case, moves to a rhetorical analysis, and then connects the analysis to ideas of constitutive rhetoric. The McCarthy sections examines the "Have you no sense of decency?" exchange between Welch and McCarthy. It begins with a brief explanation of McCarthy's reputation, and then utilizes an understanding of conspiracy rhetoric in the rhetorical analysis in order to explain McCarthy's constitutive efforts. The Pledge of Allegiance analysis provides a brief a summary of the Congressional arguments made to add the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, then provides a textual analysis of the Pledge (with the addition), emphasizing the power of those words, especially given the epideictic nature of the Pledge. The Playboy research focuses on the first 1954 article, which directly addresses the question of American identity. The article is contextualized with Hugh Hefner's self-proclaimed Philosophy of Playboy. Finally, all of these case studies are tied together again with further explanations of constitutive rhetoric, showing that White's understanding of constitutive rhetoric can be used to bolster Charland and McGee's in order to give agency to the rhetor.

My study highlights a link of U.S. American hypermasculinity running through Cormac McCarthy's two novels Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), and James Baldwin's Another Country (1960). My literary interpretations of these texts suggest that U.S. American hypermasculine man originated in the American frontier and transformed into a definition of hegemonic masculinity embraced by many southern rural American men. These southern rural American men then concocted the myth of the black rapist in order to justify the mass murder of African American men after Reconstruction, inadvertently creating a figure more hypermasculine than themselves. Many black men embraced the myth of the black rapist as well as the baser patriarchal aspects of white male southern power. Consequently, black hypermasculinity evolved into the paragon of American hypermasculinity. Failed Heroes further argues that some protagonists in postwar American literature heroically fail in order not to perpetuate hypermasculinities. Continuing a modernist trend of anti-heroism, the selected protagonists develop into marginalized men due to their failure to live up to hypermasculine societal expectations. The protagonists' failure to perpetuate hypermasculinities proves heroic since it illustrates the destructiveness of these sensibilities; as a result, a sense of ironic heroism emerges from the narratives. In Blood Meridian, set in the mid-nineteenth century U.S. American West, the kid fails heroically to construct a masculine identity outside of the textual order of the judge, indicting the hypermasculine philosophies of the judge and calling into question the book's violence. In no way is the kid a classic hero; rather, his collapse exists as a direct critique of the judge's destructive philosophies. In All the Pretty Horses, set in the mid-twentieth century U.S. American South, John Grady fails to actualize his cowboy fantasy, but proves heroic in exposing its danger and destructiveness. At the end of the novel he vanishes into the countryside a failure, but unlike the mythic cowboy, he assumes the role of heroic failure because his narrative contributes to the relinquishment of a destructive male myth. In Song of Solomon, set in Ohio and Virginia during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, Milkman Dead functions as a black man who has the opportunity to break free from choking definitions of black masculinity. In the end he fails to break free and flies to Africa, leaving his family and his only hope at real freedom, his aunt Pilate, to die. Continuing a cycle of male flight at the expense of his family, community, and cultural guide renders him a failure. Morrison's final critique of hypermasculinity positions Pilate as the failed hero and shifts the emphasis of the novel to the women who represent victims of kinship systems and the incest taboo. The incest in the novel functions as a metaphor for Pilate's philosophy that black identity ought to come from black culture, a notion I call cultural incest. Another Country, set in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s, details the plight of an urban African American man struggling to reconcile his homosexual desire with the black hypermasculine cool pose he dons as overcompensation. Rufus Scott's death proves heroic as a critique of the rigid definitions of urban black masculinity. African Americans, and by extension all Americans, might employ their U.S. American history of oppression as a platform for a new vision of masculinity based on heteronormative failure and queerness. The association of blackness with oppression, and as a result non-normative sexuality, presents an opportunity to redefine blackness as abjection. The very failure of African Americans in measuring up to destructive notions of hypermasculinity might exist as a new definition of blackness and masculinity for all Americans.

This study investigated cultural bias in the 46 Verbal items of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (MSCA). Two separate approaches to the examination of item bias were utilized. The first approach examined item bias empirically by comparing performance differences in terms of correct item responses given by examinees from Anglo and Mexican-American cultures. The second approach addressed the issue of face validity by obtaining the opinion of Anglo-American (AA) and Mexican-American (MA) judges regarding their perception of item bias for AA and MA examinees. The two criteria used to judge item bias were examinee opportunity to learn item content and examinee familiarity with the language used in the items. The Verbal items of the McCarthy Scales were administered to 59 Anglo-American and 59 Mexican-American examinees matched for age and sex. Ability differences were controlled by generating common ability intervals for both groups based on overall Verbal scale score. The obtained data was tested utilizing procedures for the analysis of contingency tables. Two statistical analyses applied to the data were Scheuneman's modified chi-square and the log-linear technique using the likelihood ratio chi-square statistic. Statistically significant performance differences between the two groups, identified by both analyses, were found for only two items of the Word Knowledge II subtest which measures vocabulary comprehension. The differences in perception of the two groups of judges in terms of opportunity to learn item content and familiarity with item language across AA and MA examinees was examined. The obtained ratings of item bias were tested with the chi-square statistic. Significant differences in ratings of two groups of judges on the opportunity to learn dimension were found for 16 items. It was revealed that more AA judges perceived 14 of these items to be fair for both groups of examinees in terms of opportunity to learn, while more MA judges perceived the AA child as having more opportunity to learn the content of these items. However for two of the 16 items the statistically significant difference between the two groups reflected the perception of MA judges that bias favored the MA examinees. There was a high degree of agreement between the two groups of judges in their rating on the familiarity dimension, with both groups indicating more familiarity with item language for AA subjects for most items. Significant differences in the ratings of the two groups were identified for four items. These items were from the Word Knowledge and Verbal Memory subtests. For three of these items the obtained data indicated that the greater number of MA judges perceived these items as favoring AA subjects. For the remaining item the results pointed out that more MA judges perceived that MA subjects seemed to have greater familiarity with the item language as compared with their Anglo counterpart. There was no discernible pattern of judgment in terms of item difficulty, with easier items perceived as more biased than more difficult ones in some cases. Judge responses appear more related to specific item content than level of difficulty or verbal complexity. The findings from both studies led to the conclusion that the majority of the verbal items in the McCarthy Scales seemed to be fair for Anglo and Mexican-American subjects. Implications of these findings were discussed and recommendations were made for future studies intended to examine item bias.

Thesis (M.S.)--School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, 2008. / "June 2008." Title from cover. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-62). Also available via the Internet.