James Dorson 
Counternarrative Possibilities [PDF ebook] 
Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns

Counternarrative Possibilities reads Cormac Mc Carthy’s Westerns against the backdrop of two formative tropes in American mythology: virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after ‘9/11’ ). Looking at Mc Carthy’s Westerns in the context of American Studies, James Dorson shows how his novels counter the national narratives underlying these tropes and reinvest them with new, potentially transformative meaning. Departing from prevailing accounts of Mc Carthy that place him in relation to his literary antecedents, Counternarrative Possibilities takes a forwardlooking approach that reads Mc Carthy’s work as a key influence on millennial fiction. Weaving together disciplinary history with longstanding debates over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book is at once an exploration of the limits of ideology critique in the twenty-first century and an original reconsideration of Mc Carthy’s work ‘after postmodernism’.

Tabla de materias

Contents

Acknowledgements 9

Preface 11

Part I: Narratives and Counternarratives

1 The Power of Narrative 19

Connect the Dots 20

Closure and Emplotment 24

Narrative, Legitimacy, Force 28

Untranscendable Horizons 30

2 Counternarrative Possibilities 38

The Historicist Origins of the Counternarrative 39

Two Conceptions of Society 44

The Roles of Negation 49

‘Complicity Battling Redemption’: Counternarrative Tactics 58

Negative Closure 68

3 American Studies and the Virgin Land Myth 74

Indian-Hating and the Logic of Fetishism 75

The Myth and Symbol School’s ‘Doctrine of Doubleness’ 87

American Unexceptionalism: Violation and Revisionism 93

‘The Entire Planet as a Unit of Analysis’: Postnationalism and the New Americanists 100

4 American Studies and the Homeland Myth 108

The National ‘Wound’ 109

The Rhetoric of Rupture 118

The Eternal Homecoming 126

Metanostalgia 134

Part II: Cormac Mc Carthy’s Westerns Strings and Mazes: Introducing Cormac Mc Carthy 141

5 Blood Meridian and the Misrule of Law 151

Violence, Law, Westerns 153

The Primordial Crime 161

Judge Holden’s Economy of Justice 167

The Horror of the Real 173

6 Aesthetic Coldness 177

‘Things Are Seldom What They Seem’: Blood Meridian’s Anti-Realism 178

Into the Grand Hotel Abyss 182

The Violence of Form 185

The Monster of Reason 189

7 Blood Meridian’s Dangerous Absolutes 193

The Historical Absolute 194

The Desert Absolute 198

Absolute Instability 202

Mutual Accountability 207

8 Saving Romance from ‘America’ in the Border Trilogy 210

‘Another World Entire’: The Americanization of Romance 211

Reading the Border Trilogy through American Studies 219

Radical Longing and Fugitive Time 227

‘Ten Thousand Worlds for the Choosing’ 232

9 From Pastiche to Tragedy 238

Suffering Beyond Pastiche: Genre and Post-Postmodernism 240

Mourning the Sublime 250

‘That Which Is and Must Be’: The Punishment of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham 252

The Deconsecration of Capital 261

Conclusion: Perilous Ground 267

Between Loss and Longing 271

Perilous Ground 281

Bibliography 284

Index 302

Sobre el autor

James Dorson is an assistant professor of North American Studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute of Freie Universität Berlin.