THESIS ABSTRACT This thesis deals with the problematics and the role of American frontier and American West in Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy consisting of All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1999). The reading proper focuses mainly on the second novel of the trilogy, making frequent references to both the other two volumes of the trilogy and to Blood Meridian (1985), a novel directly preceding the trilogy itself. The main goal of the thesis is to demonstrate that the trilogy not only critically engages with the American nationalist ideology represented by a nostalgically conceptualized myths of the American frontier, but that it also offers its own alternative vision of the concept of the frontier and of American national identity. The thesis further claims that McCarthy's critical approach to the mythical representations of the American history bears strong resemblance to the philosophy of American pragmatism as defined by a French philosopher Giles Deleuze in his works dedicated to American thinking and culture. In his pragmatic view of American identity the frontier ceases to function in its traditional, nationalistic sense as a line of separation that divides the social and political space into binary categories, and instead it is understood as an open and...
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:nusl.cz/oai:invenio.nusl.cz:404428 |
Date | January 2019 |
Creators | Polívka, Zdeněk |
Contributors | Procházka, Martin, Roraback, Erik Sherman |
Source Sets | Czech ETDs |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis |
Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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