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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Re-Imagining America: Twenty-First Century Disaster And Salvation In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Ellen Gray
Re-Imagining America: Twenty-First Century Disaster And Salvation In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Ellen Gray
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores four contemporary novels set in the American South and analyzes the understandings of American pasts, perceptions of current social and political crises, and projections of possible future paths they contain. Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones tell stories of disasters the natures of which reflect prominent anxieties concerning the twenty-first century position of the United States as a global power. The total destruction leaving behind an unrecognizable nation that McCarthy imagines in his post-apocalyptic novel suggests the viewpoint that the degree to which the U.S. is indicted in the use of unethical practices …
Another World Entire: The Posthumanism Of Cormac Mccarthy, Margaret Henson Pless
Another World Entire: The Posthumanism Of Cormac Mccarthy, Margaret Henson Pless
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Cormac McCarthy's novels are thought experiments in what it might mean to write posthuman works of fiction. In a close reading of three of his novels, Child of God, The Crossing, and The Road , this project reveals how McCarthy's stories paradoxically unravel the dangerous human desire to make of our world a story. His characters, Lester Ballard, Billy Parham, and the boy, become posthuman as they live increasingly outside of narrative. Their existences extend beyond the page, in a radical intimacy with the world, evident in the haunting and elusive presences, and absences, of wolves, hawks, trout, and even …