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Sep 07, 2024
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AREL 825 - Blood America: Reading Cormac McCarthy3 credits
In his summary survey of great books, The Western Canon, the critic Harold Bloom included Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The reclusive novelist came into even more prominence recently when the film version of No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for best picture of 2008. McCarthy’s is a frightening humanism, a verbal artistry of heroic scale and risk, and a vision of historical American character having a dark beauty that both appalls and renews. He has created American characters that seem to come out hard from our collective memory, such as Judge Holden, Billy Parham, and most recently and simply, “the man” and “the boy.” This course will concentrate on six of McCarthy’s novels from Blood Meridian to The Road. It will ask questions about their representations of traditional male journeys; regeneration through violence; Southwest American nature, borders, and their peoples; narrative technique; roots in and contrasts with genre Westerns, Faulkner, and other American writers; immedicable evil; and intransigent courage and goodness.
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