The Cormac McCarthy Journal最新文献

{"title":"The Authority of Currency in Cormac McCarthy’s: Blood Meridian","authors":"John M. Robison","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.15.1.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.15.1.0030","url":null,"abstract":"Multiple McCarthy scholars have written about Blood Meridian as a commentary on the development of the geopolitical and legal structures of the modern United States. This article attempts to do the same with shifts in economic structures. These shifts manifest themselves in the novel through the motif of coins and specie, objects that Glanton and his men grant an authority to that is almost absolute. Coins emerge repeatedly throughout the novel, ascending nearly to the realm of the supernatural. This culminates in the coldforger scene in which the authority of currency is seen to be the judge’s central aim. The judge’s attempts to kill the kid can then be partially connected with his refusal to accept the authority of currency, a reading justified by the correspondence of their encounter in the jakes with important historical developments in American currency. Keywords: Blood Meridian, currency, economics, Judge Holden, coldforger","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133674638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mysteries of the Meridian Revealed: McCarthy’s Anachronistic Tarot","authors":"Robert A Kottage","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.15.1.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.15.1.0003","url":null,"abstract":"John Sepich’s Notes on Blood Meridian provides a chapter of analysis on a practice depicted very briefly in the novel: cartomancy. Although McCarthy only spends roughly three pages overtly treating the subject, Sepich successfully demonstrates tarot card divination to be something of a guiding principle throughout the text. However, neither Sepich nor any other critic to date has addressed the clues indicating that McCarthy’s tarot deck is not only an amalgam, but that it contains elements found in no known deck prior to the twentieth century. The anachronistic tarot images in Blood Meridian are a seeming anomaly in an otherwise thoroughly researched work. But even the error is a complicated one, a product of research. An examination of McCarthy’s twentieth-century cards provides insight on fate and free will within the world of the text. The Rider-Waite image (that of a young man refusing a cup offered by an otherworldly hand) sheds light on several scenes in the novel, most notably the climactic Fort Griffin barroom scene. But more importantly, it links the kid with a doomed Christ, who prays in Gethsemane: “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131133919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Embodying Violence: The Case of Cormac McCarthy","authors":"B. Evenson","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0135","url":null,"abstract":"These are the remarks of Brian Evenson, who gave the keynote address at the recent conference \"Fifty Years of Cormac McCarthy.\" The conference was held at the University of Memphis in October 2015 and celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper.It's a pleasure for me to be here, speaking to you about Cormac McCarthy, one of my favorite writers. I was privileged enough to come, while still a graduate student, to the first Cormac McCarthy conference at Bellarmine College more than twenty years ago (and indeed have been to several McCarthy conferences since). I felt at the time I was watching the start of something genuinely significant. I'm pleased to be back here today to see the fruits of that beginning, to see how developed the scholarship on McCarthy now is, and to celebrate fifty years of Cormac McCarthy. It has been a joy to hear the papers delivered so far, and to be thrown again deeply into the world of McCarthy, a world which, despite its darkness, is so beautifully rendered as to seem to me always a genuine pleasure to read.I am going to talk about McCarthy's fiction and in particular the palpability of that fiction, the way that it seems almost tangible in a fashion that the fiction of very few writers do. I am going to speak, among other things, about embodied and disembodied violence in McCarthy's work, how McCarthy, even when he is ultimately on the way to a potentially redemptive or hopeful moment, passes- sometimes quite literally, even graphically-through bodies. Since I'm a writer, I'm going to try, too, to discuss McCarthy's style in relation to the embodied, palpable quality of his work. This is all a way, ultimately, of trying to determine why it is that McCarthy's work has such staying power, and why we still gather to talk about him a half-century after he first began to publish.I'm going to start, no doubt to the surprise of most of you-particularly those of you who know I'm a former Mormon-with a quotation from early Mormon Church leader Brigham Young. \"And inasmuch as the Lord Almighty has designed us to know all that is in the earth, both the good and the evil, and to learn not only what is in heaven, but what is in hell, you need not expect ever to get through learning. Though I mean to learn all that is in heaven, earth, and hell\" (Young 94).One of the reasons that I quote this is because it sounds a little bit like something Judge Holden might say. But the larger reason is the expansiveness of the idea, the idea that everything is worthy of attention, whether it be in heaven, earth, or hell. For me, that broad curiosity, that embrace of heaven and earth and hell and all points between, is what characterizes McCarthy's work-though his embrace of heaven strikes me as the most tenuous of the three. He is curious about everything, interested in even the most hellish landscapes. He is intrigued by the down and out and the suffering of those existing along the edges of","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"133 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132097176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Salvaging The Counselor: Watching Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott’s Really Trashy Movie","authors":"Jacob Agner","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.14.2.0204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.14.2.0204","url":null,"abstract":"I argue that Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor, set amid the U.S.–Mexican drug wars, critiques late capitalism through self-reflexive genre filmmaking. Centered on the metaphor of trash, this essay connects the film’s low-art spectacle with the drug trade’s entrenchment in globalization and multinational capitalism. The Counselor, in effect, resists cinema’s central role in the culture industry by tying its “trashy” plot to the historically pressing narcotics crisis and the twenty-first century’s accumulating trash heaps.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126558816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Human Become Coin: Neoliberalism, Anthropology, and Human Possibilities in No Country for Old Men","authors":"J. Elmore, Rick Elmore","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0168","url":null,"abstract":"No Country for Old Men figures the convergence of economics and human nature as the emergence of a new kind of humanity arising from a shift in economic processes. Key to this shift is the conviction that market logic governs human nature, social decision-making, and reality itself. We show how No Country For Old Men details the anthropology of neoliberalism both in the character of Chigurh and in its framing of the characters and narrative of the novel as a whole. In doing so, we unify for the first time two dominant themes in McCarthy scholarship: human nature and economics.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132250250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Blood Meridian’s Deathcarts and Angels of Death","authors":"Dianne C. Luce","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0227","url":null,"abstract":"This note explores the cultural implications of the Penitente sect’s deathcart and figure of Death armed with bow and arrow, and identifies McCarthy’s source in Fergusson’s Rio Grande. The Penitentes’ female death angel, La Muerte, is represented either as a bare skeleton or in feminine garb. The ungendered skeleton in Blood Meridian allows for the protagonist’s misinterpretation of the figure as male and thus a reminder of his Indian-fighting. The eldress in the rocks, wearing the icons of Our Lady of Guadalupe but unrecognized by the man, is another death angel, a conflation of the Virgin and Death. The deathcart appears not only in the Penitente procession, but also in the tarot reader’s prediction of Black Jackson’s death and again in the buffalo bonecarts. Together these tropes support the novel’s representation of border, national, and human history as the procession of Death Triumphant.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"480 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123399267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories by Matthew L. Potts (review)","authors":"N. Lawrence","doi":"10.5040/9781501306587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501306587","url":null,"abstract":"Matthew L. Potts. CormacMcCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories. Bloomsbury, 20i5. $111 hardcover. 224 pages.In Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament, Matthew Potts confronts the collapse of stable metaphysics in McCarthy's novels. This seemingly nihilistic worldview, Potts argues, operates in intimate conversation with the sacramental imagery that he identifies as\"the most pervasive religious trope in all McCarthy's work\" (1). Potts offers a valuable contribution to McCarthy studies as well as scholarship in Christian theology, noting that scholarship on the novels, for all its attention to McCarthy's treatment of religious themes, pays too little attention to this trope-a relative neglect that \"impoverishes interpretation\" while \"also withhold[ing] from Christian theology a potentially useful reminder of the sacrament's significance for the theological tradition\" (1). Indeed, by the end of the book he is persuasive when he suggests that \"the most interesting upshot of this study, perhaps, will not be in how theology helps us to read McCarthy, but in how McCarthy might embolden those of us compelled to write theology\" (187).While acknowledging the wealth of important scholarship devoted to McCarthy's treatment of religious themes, Potts notes that much of this critical conversation tends toward reductive labels such as \"nihilistic,\" \"Gnostic,\" and \"Christian.\" McCarthy, Potts argues, does not write Christian novels, but he does invoke Christian sacrament in ways that highlight its insistence upon the value of human life in the here and now. In McCarthy, that is, sacrament is revealed to express the intrinsic value of human action, rather than in reaching outward toward stable \"systems of metaphysical meaning\" (4). Such signs-often manifesting as humble acts of hospitality, bread-breaking, love, storytelling, and sacrifice between characters, or as narratively constructed \"note[s] of mystery\" that \"resist totalization in thought\" (70)-provide crucial narrative hedges against the unremitting visions of cruelty, violence, and death that impel McCarthy's canon.One of the most notable achievements of this text is its engagement with an impressive roster of postmodern theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Adriana Cavaerero, Karl Barth, and Judith Butler, while also conducting careful, insightful readings of McCarthy and his critics (with primary focus on the novels spanning from Suttree through The Road). Indeed, this book has much to offer anyone seeking to heighten their understanding of postmodern theory. At times readers may find jarring Potts' method of using subheadings and switching from sustained periods of close reading to lengthy considerations of relevant postmodern theorists to scholarly discourses in theology and then back to McCarthy. However, the complexity of the problems with which this text wrestles seems to me to necessitate such careful, step-by-step navigation. Potts h","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121499309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kierkegaard Talking Down Schopenhauer: The Sunset Limited as a Philosophical Dialogue","authors":"R. Wyllie","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0186","url":null,"abstract":"Cormac McCarthy’s minimalist 2006 “novel in dramatic form,” The Sunset Limited, revives an ancient genre—philosophical dialogue. In the book, a born-again Christian ex-convict, Black, searches for reasons to convince a misanthropic professor, White, not to kill himself. Black’s faith, White’s despair, and their open-ended Socratic dialogue all reflect the influence of Søren Kierkegaard upon McCarthy. White, the suicidal ascetic, consistently extends what Kierkegaard once called “the most fearful” philosophy of all—Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Can ordinary American Christianity refute this systematic Schopenhauerian despair? Taking cues from Kierkegaard, The Sunset Limited stages a dark and inconclusive philosophical dialogue.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115183468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"High Road to Hell: Milton, Blake, McCarthy","authors":"M. Steven","doi":"10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CORMMCCAJ.14.2.0149","url":null,"abstract":"This article demonstrates that the poetry of William Blake irradiates Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, where it occupies one side of a dialectical relationship with the work of another poet, John Milton. The essay’s argument is that the poetic works of Milton and Blake strain against one another from within McCarthy’s prose to determinately shape how we read the novel. It seeks to show how an understanding of why certain literary influences are enunciated will contribute to our knowledge of the book’s relationship to its thematic content and historical referents.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122068589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Divinations of Agency in Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men","authors":"Brad Bannon","doi":"10.5325/cormmccaj.14.1.0078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.14.1.0078","url":null,"abstract":"McCarthy’s characteristic interest in questions of determinism and agency is perhaps nowhere as evident as it is in Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, yet little attention has been given to the way in which these novels are linked through the imagery of coinage, circulation, and currency. In this article, I argue that McCarthy’s conception of agency is explicitly tied to a criticism of economic modernity that traces its history from the scalp-hunting of the Glanton gang to the calm collection methods of Anton Chigurh, outlining a trajectory of spiritual decline that reaches its culmination in the final years of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":126318,"journal":{"name":"The Cormac McCarthy Journal","volume":"14 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123648919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}