Divine Paraphrase: Cormac McCarthy

2017 ◽  
pp. 40-59
Author(s):  
Brian Willems
Keyword(s):  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Road ◽  
Quentin Meillassoux

In Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a boy and his father struggle to survive in a world decimated by an unspecified catastrophe.This post-apocalyptic world is dark, but relatively so because it is perceivable. The pre-apocalyptic world, as represented by the language of the father, is different. The father’s world is full of objects which are known and useful. The father’s world is a place of light and speech, while the boy’s world consists of darkness and silence. However, rather than reading the post-apocalyptic world as one of loss, its darkness is taken as a sign of potential. While this interpretation goes against the grain of most of the novel, it is supported by the repeated figuration of the boy as God. Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux are the main philosophers used to develop this argument.

Speaking in the face of disintegration

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Temko
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Final Word ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
The Road ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
The Face

In its analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, the present article aims to establish that, despite the bleakness of the deathscape portrayed, McCarthy nevertheless did not intend for violence to get the final word. Through a discussion of the dialogues of the novel, this article explores to what extent they may indeed be qualified as dialogical. Moreover, examining the instances in which language as communication becomes a problem in light of both the concerns and the mechanisms of playwrights of the absurd Beckett and Pinter, it intends to show that even though the referents of human culture appear to have vanished close to entirely from the face of The Road’s earth, sociability and empathy nonetheless manage to survive. Keywords: Cormac McCarthy; The Road; Absurdism; Samuel Beckett; Harold Pinter

scholarly journals “The deepest depths of human life”: existential motifs in the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (16) ◽  
pp. 61-67
Author(s):  
I. Kachur
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Road ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
Essential Questions

The implementation of the basic principles of existentialism in Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” is studied in the article. The author states that this philosophical movement, which explores the problem of human existence, had a significant impact on the formation of world literature and origin of a new literary movement that bears the very same name. The works of American writer Cormac McCarthy are philosophical in nature and cover a great variety of themes such as life and death, freedom, relationship between parents and children, man and nature. The post-apocalyptic novel “The Road”, which brought the author worldwide fame, is considered the pinnacle of his writing skills, as it thematically, compositionally, and stylistically embodies the traditional features of McCarthy’s works. It does not have a large number of characters, which allows readers to pay more attention to the philosophical idea of the novel. The author tries to find answers to the essential questions of meaning and purpose of human existence, which makes it possible to identify a significant number of existential motifs, such as absurdity, forlornness, fear, freedom, alienation, individuality, and so on. The motif of absurdity is manifested through the depiction of an almost completely uninhabitable world, in which cruelty and death prevail. The personages of the novel are devoid of illusions and disappointed in life, especially the older generation; so they just try to survive and keep their individuality. The main characters have a dreadful fear of starvation or violent death, and they are also afraid of losing humanity and hope for a better future. Therefore, fear frees them from the conventions and laws of the hostile world and gives meaning to their existence.

Speculative Realism and Science Fiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Willems
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Quentin Meillassoux

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.

‘Whatever form you spoke of you were right’: Multivalence and ambiguous address in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Warde
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Second Person ◽  
The Road ◽  
Person Pronoun ◽  
Ontological Uncertainty

This article explores the workings of second-person pronoun forms in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road. More particularly, the analysis focuses on examples of ‘doubly deictic you’ (Herman, 2002), and demonstrates how the novel exploits the uncertain deictic, referential and address functions of this particular pronoun form to develop what I term a ‘post-apocalyptic poetics’, through which it attempts to explore – and enact – the spatial and temporal dislocations that ensue from the fictional apocalypse. The article also demonstrates how the novel’s indeterminate use of narrative you creates profound hermeneutical (and often ontological) uncertainty for readers, who must often suspend any attempt to fix the positions from and to which the story is addressed. McCarthy’s opaque use of the terms you and your throughout the novel creates profound polyphony and multivalence by preventing readers from clearly distinguishing the discourse and perspectives of protagonists from those of the narration, and by thus impelling readers to develop several interpretations of key passages, all of which must be sustained simultaneously. Finally, the analysis explores how the (potential) apostrophic effects associated with doubly deictic you serve to immerse readers in the horrors of the post-apocalyptic world, thus increasing the novel’s ecocritical import.

scholarly journals Uncovering the Struggling Inner Voice of Green Beings Through The Novel “The Overstory” By Richard Powers

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (S1-Dec2020) ◽  
pp. 63-66
Author(s):  
Saranya Lakshmanan ◽  
P Nagaraj
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Richard Powers ◽  
Human Survival ◽  
Inner Voice

Nature and literature are interwoven. Without natural world, the beauty of words cannot be celebrated. So far in literature the exquisiteness of nature is being taken into deliberation. Trees play a crucial role in our planet but they are taken for granted by humans for their sophisticated life. It is easy to plant tree saplings but it is very difficult to protect a tree. Trees play an important role for human survival. Still people are not concerned to protect or conserve forest because they are connected with machines than with nature. Every individuals run behind the technical advancement that they will protest in virtual media to safeguard nature but not in reality. Trees do communicate but human fails to understand. This study unfurls the dark destroying side of nature through the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Overstory by Robert Powers.

Site Unseen

Site Reading ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 149-156
Author(s):  
David J. Alworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Road ◽  
Sociological Thought ◽  
The Moment ◽  
A Site

This chapter argues that to perform a site reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road is to appreciate how the text functions as a novel of purpose that aims to vivify the planet as what Latour would call a “matter of concern.” Still, The Road reads less as a critique of contemporary social problems than as a “thought-experiment,” a sort of literary climate model, forecasting a chillingly plausible correlation between a ruined site and a grisly social order. By imagining this correlation through narrative form, McCarthy offers his own striking contribution to environmental and sociological thought, a contribution that starts to become apparent the moment we ask how his setting functions as an actant, both in the novel itself and beyond.

Description as Redress

2019 ◽  
pp. 65-87
Author(s):  
David James
Keyword(s):  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
The Road ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Literary Description

This chapter examines the poetics and ethics of literary description as mode of redress in traumatic fictions that evoke seemingly indescribable circumstances. It discusses the affective energy of style as it counterpoints catastrophe and suffering in the work of Cormac McCarthy and W. G. Sebald. In so doing, the chapter poses larger questions that establish some of the book’s principal interpretive coordinates. Namely, can expression compensate for plot? What ethical implications does the brilliant description of devastation in The Road (2006) and Austerlitz (2001) magnify, when athletic acts of depiction counterweigh the material or mental damage they elegantly convey? Behaving as such, how does literary style probe as much as it affirms its own consolatory affordances? Over the course the chapter, description emerges as a form of narration in its own right. And the importance of reading for description highlights the need to distinguish this kind of analytical attention from the proposed aims of so-called ‘descriptive reading’.

Haunted Roadscapes in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-153
Author(s):  
Nicole Dib
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Road Trip ◽  
The Road ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Unique Experience

Abstract In this article, I argue that Jesmyn Ward deploys a road trip in her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing as a literary formula through which she demonstrates the immobilizing effects of racism and incarceration on contemporary black lives. The association of the American road-trip novel with freedom and free movement is strong in the American imaginary, and Ward manipulates this association to explore what happens when automobile travelers are precarious rather than privileged. The road trip in Ward's novel makes visible various forces of mobility and immobility that differentiate citizens by race. She conjures two dimensions of the African American experience that are immobilizing: the carceral system and the risk of “driving while black.” Sing, Unburied, Sing already critiques the traditional road trip in its plot and narrative structure; for Ward, it is the linkages of dimensions of African American immobilization around the road trip that are powerful. Ward's novel demonstrates that black automobility, or the unique experience of the road for racialized drivers, reveals the political and social dynamics that shape our conception of the road for all drivers. Furthermore, I analyze how the road trip within the novel “unburies” a story about the violence of incarceration. I explore how Ward finesses that iconic American narrative trope, the journey by car that ought to be freeing, to heighten her critique of racist, anti-black structures of oppression in the United States.

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