scholarly journals CHALLENGING THE WESTERN IN CORMAC MCCARTHY'S BLOOD MERIDIAN

Author(s):  
Arijana Luburić-Cvijanović

Set in the nineteenth-century American Southwest, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian rewrites the conventions of the western genre through a historically informed fictionalized account of the Glanton gang. As part of McCarthy’s subversive literary oeuvre, the novel intends to deromanticize the western’s underlying myths and dismantle its binaries, as well as to expose the brutality of the frontier and reflect on violence as a historiographic condition. Within studies of the western, McCarthy’s work, and transgressive literature, this article wishes to contribute to the existing discussions of McCarthy’s writing by examining Blood Meridian as a critical postmodern western or anti-western, and analyzing its strategies of demythologizing the West and the western.

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-261
Author(s):  
Katja Laug ◽  
Katja Laug

Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy’s work has become required reading in literary criticism, and yet no syllabus appears to provision for the in-depth discussion his texts, particularly the 1985 novel, Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West, require. The ‘And So the Judge Returns: Blood Meridian Workshop’ at the University of Warwick emerged from the idea to provide a space that facilitates such a discussion. Designed to bring academics and non-academics of all ages together in one space, the workshop quickly developed from a small, Warwick-based event into a live-streamed and recorded international conference with a significant audience based in the United States. The workshop reaffirmed the interest in the novel’s enigmatic antagonist Judge Holden and motifs such as the landscape and violence. Less traditional ideas of the judge were also discussed, such as reading the judge as fraud or as weary of chaos and perpetual violence. The workshop succeeded in creating a space to share thoughts and ideas and continue the academic discourse on the novel. Speakers included Dr Nicholas Monk and Dr David Holloway, both established McCarthy critics; Peter Josyph whose artistic engagement with McCarthy’s work and career his highly respected among critics; and Dr Dan O’Hara, expert in American Studies. Ronan Hatfull and Katja Laug represented the younger generation of McCarthy critics. Live-streaming also afforded insights into the academic discourse to the mostly non-academic online audience. The article provides a summary of the day’s events and the links to the edited recordings.


2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.


Author(s):  
Б. Ниясалиева ◽  
Н. Алтыкеева

Аннотация. Ч.Айтматов “Кылым карытар бир күн” романында ачыктап бере албаган бийлик маселеси кийинки демократиянын учурунда романдын уландысы катары берилген “Чынгызхандын ак булуту “ аттуу чыгармасында таама көрсөтүлдү. Аталган чыгарма сталиндик бийликти сынга алуу менен бийликтин курмандыктары болгон күнөөсүз адамдардын оор тагдырын чагылдырат. Сталиндин образын ачуу максатында элдик легендага кайрылып, Чынгызхандын образы аркылуу Сталиндин образын чагылдырган. Чыгармадагы Тансыкбаевдин образы мансапка манчыркап, адам тагдыры менен ойногон наадан адамдардын образын ачууда колдонулган. Абуталип, Эрдене, Догуланг – булар бийликтин курмандыктары. Алар алдыда өлүм күтүп турса да, өз көз караштарынан тайышпады, өлүмгө тике кароо менен жеңиш дайыма алар тарапта экендигин аныктай алышты. Ырас, Тансыкбаев да өз максатына жете алган жок, Чынгызхан болсо батышты багынтам деген тилегине жетпеди, ал эбегейсиз күчүн жоготту, мындан ары анын жолу болбоду. Түйүндүү сөздөр: образ, демократия, каарман, легенда, идея, көркөм ой жүгүртүү. Аннотация. Проблема правительства, которую Ч.Айтматов не смог раскрыть в романе “И дольше века длится день, ярко показаны в произведении “Белое облако Чингизхана” созданное во время демократии как продолжение названного произведения. В данном произведений критикуется и отражается тяжелая судьба безвинного народа, которые стали жертвами сталинского режима. Писатель обратился к народной легенде для раскрытия образа Сталина, через образ Чингизхана. В произведений образ Тансыкбаева применятся для раскрытия образов людей, которые ради собственного нажива использовали судьбы народа. Абуталип, Эрдене, Догуланг – они жертвы правительства. Несмотря ни на что, они не отреклись от своих убеждений, стояли на смерть ради справедливости. В статье говорится о не достижении своей цели Тансыкбаева, о не покорении Чингизханом Запада, о том, что Чингизхан потерял всю свою силу и удача его покидает. Ключевые слова: власть, образ, демократия, герой, легенда, идея, художественное размышление.. Annotation. The problem of the government, which Ch. Aitmatov could not reveal in the novel “And the day lasts more than a century”is clearly shown in the works “White cloud of Genghis Khan” created during the democracy as a continuation of the title work. In this work criticized and reflected the heavy fate of innocent people who were the victims of the Stalinist regime. The writer appealed to the folk legend to reveal the image of Genghis Khan the writer conveys the image of Stalin. In the work (composition) the image of Tansykbaev will be used to reveal the images of people who used the people’s destinies for their own profit . Abutalip, Erdene, Doulan-they are the victims of government. No matter what, they didn’t renounce their beliefs, stood to death for justice . The article says about not achieving the goal of Tansykbaeva, about not conguering the West by Genghis Khan and that Genghis Khan lost all his strength and good luck leaves him. Key words: power, image, democracy, hero, legend, idea, artistic reflection.


Author(s):  
Hans Hummer

Chapter 1 explores the modern values that have animated kinship studies since their emergence in the nineteenth century. It examines the sudden invention of kinship by Johann Bachofen, Henry Maine, John Ferguson McLennan, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and Lewis Henry Morgan in the 1860s, and the internal and external developments in the West that prompted their discoveries: revolutionary agitation, the engagement with “primitives” around the globe, industrialization and the disintegration of old solidarities, and intellectual revolutions in the study of prehistory, especially Indo-European studies and Darwinian evolution. Social theorists transformed kinship into an elemental form of human sociality and evolutionary development, and a building block of the emerging liberal order as the West coped with the ontological sea change wrought by the desacralization and industrialization of society.


Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.


Author(s):  
Émile Zola

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere ‘human beasts’ who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to undermine not only the moral values of a deeply conservative society, but also the whole code of psychological description on which the realist novel was based. Together with the important ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ in which Zola defended himself against charges of immorality, Thérèse Raquin stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock. This new translation is based on the second edition of 1868. The Introduction situates the novel in the context of Naturalism, medicine, and the scientific ideas of Zola's day.


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