Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy's Westerns (Nordamerikastudien, 36) - Softcover

Dorson, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3593505541 ISBN 13: 9783593505541

Verlag: Campus Verlag, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Counternarrative Possibilities reads Cormac McCarthy's Westerns against the backdrop of two formative tropes in American mythology: virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after '9/11' ). Looking at McCarthy'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 McCarthy that place him in relation to his literary antecedents, Counternarrative Possibilities takes a forwardlooking approach that reads McCarthy'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 McCarthy's work 'after postmodernism'.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

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Acknowledgements

This book is a result of the immersion into Cormac McCarthy's fictional worlds afforded me during my three years at the Graduate School of North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. I would especially like to thank my dissertation supervisor, Ulla Haselstein, for her invaluable sup-port and encouragement while writing. Winfried Fluck and Heinz Ickstadt, who were also part of my supervisor team, shaped the book significantly by tempering my political and aesthetic idealism, while conversations with Donald Pease and Hayden White, as visiting scholars in Berlin, helped keep that idealism alive. Discussions with my fellow graduate students were always a source of inspiration. So were the discussions with students in the classes I have taught over the years at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies. I am grateful to Martyn Bone from Copenhagen University for his initial faith in my work that led me to pursue a path in research to begin with. In the past year, the professional support from my research assistant, Carolin Benack, has been a tremendous help. Both the German Research Foundation and the Ernst Reuter Society have been generous in their support for my work. During my research, I spent time perusing the Cormac McCarthy Papers in the Albert B. Alkek Library at Southwest Texas State University. I owe my gratitude to the helpful library staff there, as well as to those who helped make my stay at the University of Texas at Austin so rewarding, especially Susan S. Heinzelman and Don Graham. While my baby twins, Amy and Hannah, have not exactly helped me finish the manuscript, the spirit of the book is entirely theirs in the future generation they represent. Karin, the book would never have been possible without your loving patience and support. Most importantly, the book is shaped by growing up between two national cultures that made me critical of both, which is why I dedicate it to my Danish mother, Annelise, and my American father, Edward.

Preface

"All is telling. Do not doubt it."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (1995, 155)

This book is concerned mainly with two things. The first is how to unsettle the power of narrative. When a narrative determines our field of vision, the range of our knowledge, our beliefs and expectations, and even shapes our affective ties, how is it possible to detach oneself from it? How do we call attention to the narrative lenses through which we perceive the world? For several modern critical traditions, from Russian formalism and New Criti-cism to critical theory and poststructuralism, literature has played a key role in exposing the constructedness of our worlds. The novel in particular gives readers access to an infinite number of worlds that have been created in ways that resemble our own narrative constructions of reality, and thus possesses the unique power of calling those constructions into question. Yet novels are not frontal assaults on our precarious sense of reality. When directly faced with the fact that our perception of the world is just that, a perception, we tend to become defensive. Casting doubt on our narratives threatens the integrity of our worlds. But set apart as fiction, the power of novels is by definition more subtle, more circuitous than other forms of communication. This is both their weakness and their strength. As we usu-ally read novels for pleasure and not to have our beliefs shattered, novels, when we least expect it, may insinuate that something is wrong, that the world is not quite as we thought, that there are rifts in its otherwise seam-less surface that cannot be accounted for. Once touched by this doubt, the ground beneath us becomes shaky, the givenness of the world less given.

The second concern of this book is what happens next? How does one move from disorientation to reorientation? How are we ever to inhabit another world after our faith in the first has been shaken? Literature may be capable of inspiring a "negative capability," John Keats's memorable phrase for "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (2000, 889). Yet the irritable reaching after certainty persists. For good reason, too, because the attempt to know the world is not only a bulwark against exi-stential despair, but a condition for acting in it. Can art, then, also inspire a positive capability? Can it inspire a negative and positive capability at one and the same time? If art stirs up a storm in the waters of knowledge, is it also able to calm those waters again without returning to the murky meta-physics of narrative closure? Is it possible to settle the waters of know-ledge, so that its texture and depths remain visible, so that all the fearsome underwater creatures of politics and power, history and habit, fear and desire may still be discerned beneath its scintillating surface, together with all the dreadful crags and inscrutable fissures that we tend to avert our gaze from? Or, once settled, will those waters again become the dazzling surface they were before, a surface that blinds us and conceals its secret motiva-tions and machinations?

Infusing our narratives with doubt will always be an important function of literature, but as the disaffection with postmodern fiction that has made narrative disruption its primary business grows, the question of narrative resumption is gaining in pitch and resonance. In recent years, a number of scholars have identified a cultural push to move beyond the disruptive capabilities of postmodern fiction, and toward what critics awkwardly refer to as 'post-postmodernism.' In Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Hu-manism in Contemporary American Literature (2013), Mary K. Holland argues that we are not witnessing the end of postmodernism, but that millennial fiction has successfully combined a poststructuralist skepticism of language and narrative with a renewed interest in humanist concerns with truth and ethics. While Holland is mostly interested in postmodern aesthetics, thus following Linda Hutcheon's reading of postmodernism in A Poetics of Post-modernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988) as culturally instead of historically specific, Jeffrey T. Nealon's Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (2012) follows Fredric Jameson's view of postmodernism as a historical period determined by the structures of late capitalism. As these structures have only been intensified in the three decades since Jameson's diagnosis, Nealon suggests that the additional prefix of 'post' to postmodernism is the appropriate marker of its intensification rather than its demise. If postmodernism for neither Holland nor Nealon may be said to have 'ended,' whether as an aesthetic practice or historical period, they both identify a development within postmodernism that has made it "something recognizably different in its contours and workings" (Nealon 2012, ix).

Both the idea of post-postmodernism as a paradoxical return to narra-tive through a style that questions it, and as marking the intensification of capitalism, are relevant to this book. Rather than being unrelated defini-tions, however, I argue that it is precisely the latter development that underlies the urgency of the former; that the intensification of capitalism makes a revival of narrative as crucial as ever. One of the key contributions of Jameson's analysis is to show how cultural and aesthetic transgressions in postmodernism have lost their radical potential, that they "are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become insti-tutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society" (1997, 4). If the misbehavior of art still poses a threat to conser-vative values and norms, its misbehavior is dwarfed next to what we have come to expect...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Campus Verlag
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 3593505541
• ISBN 13: 9783593505541
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Beltz Verlagsgruppe GmbH & Co. KG; info@campus.de; ; Werderstr. 10; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland