This essay traces a tradition of what is here called ‘deathwriting’ as it stretches from Emily Dickinson, to Franz Kafka, to Samuel Beckett, to Cormac McCarthy. The work of all these writers, the essay argues, is driven by the urge to give a poetic form to the experience of death, to make death thinkable and narratable. Alongside this tradition of deathwriting, and interwoven with it, one can discern too, a fascination with ‘blind seeing’, an attempt to make darkness visible, or to overcome the distinction between the light and the dark, the visible and the invisible. In reading the connection between deathwriting and blind seeing as it runs from Dickinson to the contemporary, the essay argues that these writers allow us to glimpse a differently constituted relationship between the living and the dead, and between the perceptible and the imperceptible. At a contemporary moment when it has become urgent to rethink our apparatuses for world picturing, with the emergence of the Anthropocene as a critical context for all of our imaginings, the essay offers this history of deathwriting as a radically different way of seeing, without the aid of human light.

This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

This chapter suggests that the chief subject of Western genre fiction is the politics of individual freedom. Novels that take the American West as their principal setting and subject, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), Louis L’Amour’s Hondo (1953), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), along with short stories such as Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), ask questions that are fundamentally about liberalism. The chapter suggests that early genre Westerns tend to imagine the American West as a romantic space of absolute individual autonomy, whereas post-1970s Westerns reimagine the genre with a critical eye, as if to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the frontier myth was too often a cover story for conquest. Over the course of its twentieth-century invention and reinvention, one persistent feature of the Western genre was the many ways in which it positioned the signifiers of the West in order to imagine individualism in America.

The Conclusion begins by showing that the hobo was a picturesque archetype that was portrayed as being on the verge of extinction from its very inception. When the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’ actually came to an end following the conclusion of World War 2, however, the popular image of transiency shifted to the automobile, which had been providing its own road narratives for several decades but which found its popular spokesperson in the figure of Jack Kerouac, whose writing combined the spiritual literary vagabond tradition of Vachel Lindsay with an idealisation of the picturesque hobo. The Conclusion briefly traces the representation of transiency in the wake of On the Road, including the development of the ‘road movie’ and the way in which numerous singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s adopted the mantle of the countercultural drifter. I outline the growth of homelessness, voluntary ‘lifestyle’ transiency and the development of the relatively privileged ‘digital nomad’ in the neoliberal era, before concluding with a discussion of the use of train-hopping by people fleeing to Europe and the US to escape poverty, violence and climate change.

While the first three chapters focus on formal innovations developed by middle-class writers who strove to contest other middle-class writers’ classist portrayals of poor white southerners, the fourth chapter considers techniques pioneered by authors who grew up poor, concentrating on literary devices designed to rebut deep-rooted narratives about poor white southerners’ unhealthy appetites. Reading Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina and Barbara Robinette Moss’s memoir Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter in light of the rise of southern foodways—in 1999, the year Moss published her memoir, the Southern Foodways Alliance was founded and USA Today named Paula Deen’s restaurant The Lady and Sons the International Meal of the Year—I explore how these authors wrote hunger into the bodies of their texts. I also examine how Allison’s and Moss’s works push back against male grit lit writers’ depictions of delectable poor white women by presenting decidedly inedible female characters, as Allison’s heroine’s nickname—Bone—suggests.

This chapter reads Cormac McCarthy’s fiction as a twentieth-century American variant of what may be called metaphysical inquiries by literary means. I argue that what is missing in the current scholarship is a proper reexamination of the resonance between McCarthy’s fiction and the deeply philosophical traditions into which it taps. I critically approach such a reexamination, first, by showing how exemplary readings have connected nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy to McCarthy’s oeuvre, and, second, by proposing a recontextualization of the author’s work to the past 200 years of Western philosophical thought. I do so by presenting a new approach to the epilogue of Cities of the Plain (1998), informed by McCarthy’s recently published non-fictional essays on the origin of language, or what the writer calls “The Kekulé Problem” (2017). This approach ultimately inquires into McCarthy’s concept of nature and his notion of being human.

This chapter deals with McCarthy’s relationship to the Santa Fe Institute, a scientific think tank at which he has been a fellow for many years. This institute, founded by Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann, is known for cutting-edge research into a variety of scientific disciplines and for cross-disciplinary interaction that leads to new possibilities in scientific discovery. McCarthy has long been interested in science, and the Santa Fe Institute’s exploration of complex systems and chaos theory have informed much of his later work, specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road. Central to this chapter is McCarthy’s engagement with the idea of “emergence,” which suggests that out of the totality of individually simple interactions between constituents of a complex system there emerge higher order phenomena which are not reducible to the original components. This provocative idea finds its way into McCarthy’s thought and work.

This chapter contextualizes McCarthy’s fiction and drama in main currents of North American politics since the 1960s. The chapter outlines a set of assumptions about how political meaning and value are generated in literature, with a particular emphasis on the need to historicize the relationship between the political and the literary. The argument is grounded in the assumption that as subjects or citizens, and as consumers of language who are themselves historically produced, it is readers, not writers, who establish the parameters in which literature becomes “political.” Reading his prose through the prism of twenty-first century culture wars, the chapter suggests that McCarthy’s writing can be read as either liberal or conservative, or as both simultaneously, depending on the politics that readers themselves bring with them to the act of reading the work.

Cormac McCarthy’s aesthetic choices make him as anachronistic and difficult to place as are many of his characters. While he shares some of the thematic preoccupations of modernism and postmodernism, he lacks most of the aesthetic markers of those movements. Given his varied style, it might be more promising to think of his work as hovering aesthetically between the naturalistic and the phantasmagoric in the manner of Hawthorne’s and Melville’s romance tradition. His aesthetic borrowings from the medium of film similarly seem to place his work in a grey area between objectivity and subjectivity. While McCarthy’s own consistent associations of aesthetic value with pain and loss contrast sharply with the disinterested conception of beauty propounded by Kant, his work seems much more attuned to Kant’s other source of aesthetic value, the sublime. But McCarthy’s version of the sublime is thoroughly naturalized and historicized, embracing human fragility and contingency. This aspect of McCarthy’s aesthetic, linked as it is to the cultural attitudes born of the nineteenth-century encounter between late Romanticism and naturalism, might help account for many readers’ sense that McCarthy’s work belongs to another time.

Ritual and hospitality bind together the fiction of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. As their various protagonists struggle to find their way in landscapes no longer familiar, they turn to rituals, both established and newly concocted, as a way to navigate. Just as Hemingway’s heroes seek human connection as a way to heal their spiritual brokenness, so, too, do McCarthy’s protagonists, who turn to the rituals of hospitality. Their actions serve as affirmation that there is hope in spite of the evil prevalent in the world. In particular, the rituals of sacrifice and thanksgiving performed by women suggest God’s promise of the earth’s ultimate and mysterious goodness. These writers offer rich opportunities for comparison both in the college classroom and in critical conversation.

I argue that the concept of scientific explanation constitutes one of McCarthy’s central concerns in the Border Trilogy and that classical thought can be utilized to show that his position is remarkably similar to the Pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus. I show that both McCarthy and Heraclitus share a desire to reject the ontological reductionism of naturalism, yet at the same time avoid the ontological dualism of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. The case for McCarthy’s Heracliteanism is made by analyzing his 2017 piece on the origin of language, “The Kekule Problem: Where Did Language Come From?” I conclude that the position put forth in the first non-fiction piece of McCarthy’s career offers a framework for interpreting the central concerns of the Border Trilogy that is decidedly Heraclitean.

From the first reviews of The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy’s debut novel – published just three years after William Faulkner’s death and edited by Albert Erskine, who had worked with the Nobel laureate at Random House – comparisons with Faulkner’s work have been irresistible in the discussion of McCarthy’s fiction. This chapter focuses on key moments in McCarthy’s oeuvre that suggestively cite, parody, contest, unwrite, or otherwise engage Faulkner’s writings, to mine these connections for deeper insights into theme, form, and vision in two of the most distinguished bodies of work in American fiction. Most explicit in Suttree, with its overt echoes and revisions of The Sound and the Fury, McCarthy’s running intertextual dialogue with Faulkner also surfaces to notable effect in All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, The Crossing, The Road, and the many places in McCarthy’s work where the county figures as a meaningful imaginative geography, political formation, or social unit – thereby conjuring the specter of Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha, perhaps his supreme imaginative achievement. Other Faulkner works discussed include Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable.

This chapter focuses on the archival documents relevant to a study of McCarthy’s works completed in the 1970s: the novels Child of God and Suttree, and the teleplay The Gardener’s Son. It surveys the collections of correspondence available for these years, but concentrates primarily on McCarthy’s typescripts, identifying the relationships among the key drafts and highlighting some of the insights to be gained from the archives about the genesis, composition, revisions, and editing of these works. It shows how Child of God took its genesis from the second draft stage of Outer Dark when McCarthy repurposed material from one book for the other. For The Gardener’s Son, it surveys the documents available in the papers of McCarthy, film director Richard Pearce, and the Ecco Press Records, and outlines the changes which McCarthy made in the teleplay between its second draft and the shooting script. The Suttree section concentrates on material deleted from the novel before publication, either on McCarthy’s initiative or in response to his editor’s plea for compression. It argues that the deleted scenes saved by McCarthy in a separate folder focus primarily on the transformation of oral to literary narratives and emphasize Suttree as a writer in the making.

Critics have long debated the origins and influences on what might be called the McCarthian universe of violence. This chapter argues for a rethinking of the place of American literary naturalism – particularly the works of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser – as a key influence on McCarthy’s understanding of the omnipresence and inescapability of violence in human existence. Reading both McCarthy’s and the literary naturalists’ connections to the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century, the chapter marks striking similarities between the judge’s philosophy in Blood Meridian of “before man was, war waited for him” and the naturalist philosophy (as perhaps most purely articulated in Dreiser’s The Financier) that “life was war.” Both McCarthy and the naturalists, then, display an acceptance of a world and universe in which morality and justice no longer held any sway, violence, degradation, corruption, and indifference are the only constants, and human beings are little more than flickering, momentary flashes, either subject to or reveling in these violent characteristics.

For the first twenty-five years or so of his career, Cormac McCarthy was considered a writer of “Southern literature” by most readers. This term designates a literary genre as much as it does a region of origination. Based on paradigms established by the works of earlier Southern writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, among many others, certain aspects of setting, plot, and character become the expected norm for writers from the region. As is the case with these other writers, understanding the cultural realities of McCarthy’s South helps readers understand his Southern works. This chapter discusses the context of McCarthy’s Knoxville, from its Civil War history through Reconstruction to the advent of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). It considers how McCarthy’s works reflect this milieu as well as that of the greater South at large, trying to place McCarthy within the context of other Southern writers, and the cultural trends and currents which influenced their writing as well as his.

This chapter examines how McCarthy consistently responds to and engages with Romantic ideals. Like W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, McCarthy eludes any neat categorization or restriction to his treatment of preceding styles and genres. Like those “modernists,” McCarthy shares sensibilities that are simultaneously Romantic and anti-Romantic. His sentiments both embrace and challenge the limited sureness of the natural world by erring into sometimes surreal environments; and they revel in the ineffable nature of the uncommon quotidian man. This paradox is possible because McCarthy makes meaning in the interstitial, liminal states of knowledge. The marginalizing of the actual perceived world in favor of the world of representational memory forms the tension that transforms Romantic internalization into modernist memory. His landscapes of isolation act not as faithful descriptions of the “real world,” but a privileging of the perception and memory of that environment. He creates imperfect memories of imperfect worlds. This chapter focuses on Blood Meridian; Or, the Evening Redness in the West, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road as primary examples.

This chapter traces the milestones of McCarthy’s career and the history of scholarship devoted to his work. Initial lines of inquiry into McCarthy’s style, influences, and engagement with region, genre, and historical context grow more numerous and nuanced over time, and critical attention gradually turns to moral and religious implications in his work, McCarthy’s treatment of environment and ecology, how his characters and settings reflect changing economic practices and contexts, and McCarthy’s creative process as reflected in his manuscript materials. At present, we see wide interest in writing about how to teach McCarthy to different ages and demographics of students, how best to unpack his nonfiction and make connections to his other work, and how to track in more detail his interest in science and complex systems, especially given his long involvement with the Santa Fe Institute.

Nothing is more characteristic of Cormac McCarthy’s literary style than what Richard Woodward has called the “biblical gravity” of his prose. While references to the Bible abound in McCarthy’s work, it is the archaic vocabulary, powerful cadence, formal and thematic repetitions, and above all the paratactic syntax of McCarthy’s style inspired by the King James Bible that provide the closest link between his fiction and the Judeo-Christian tradition. This chapter examines the convergence of religion and aesthetics in McCarthy’s work as well as the function of a biblical narrative style in the fully administered world of contemporary society. Through readings of McCarthy’s essay “The Kekulé Problem” (2017), the importance of Christian mysticism to his work, and his peculiar association with the Santa Fe Institute, the chapter shows how McCarthy’s fiction draws on the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to produce a sense of mystery in the disenchanted world of modernity. At the same time, this production of mystery entails a mystification of literature that the chapter places in the postwar literary context in which McCarthy began his writing career.

This chapter offers a critical overview of all of McCarthy’s works with a special emphasis on the relationship of those works to events in his life. Born in 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, McCarthy moved to Knoxville, Tennessee as a child when his father took a job as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. He attended the University of Tennessee for a time (majoring in Liberal Arts), where he discovered his ambition to write. His early novels explore the environment around Knoxville and are portentous inquiries into the traumas related to historical change and the nature of evil. In later years, he moved west, and from 1992 onward his work is generally set in the American West. He continues with many of the same thematic concerns as he explores major philosophical and religious themes more deeply. Through his affiliation with the Santa Fe Institute, he developed an interest in scientific inquiry, and this has become a major preoccupation in his work, especially in later years.