Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy

Abstract

Over the last three decades, high school and college English programs have taught the works of Cormac McCarthy with growing regularity. Educators turn to his writing to explore a wide range of topics, from literary style and diction to the race-class-gender triad that has dominated English Studies since the 1990s. McCarthy’s work also engages American landscapes, regions, and history; themes such as violence and individualism; and literary genres including the western, the crime novel, the thriller, and the postapocalyptic narrative. Of course, many people worldwide teach and study McCarthy’s work for no reason other than to experience literature as penned by a master craftsman. Reactions vary widely. Teachers and students find McCarthy’s writing to be by turns accessible and challenging, engaging and off-putting, revealing and opaque. For all these reasons, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy is a welcome addition to the Modern Language Association’s longstanding series for teachers.Like all volumes in the MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, the text features two parts, Materials and Approaches. The brief Materials section lists all of McCarthy’s work to date (including novels, published and unpublished plays and screenplays, film adaptations, poems, essays, and stories) and covers foreign-language translations and published interviews with the author. A one-page biography of the nearly ninety-year-old McCarthy appears here as well, followed by a four-page “Critical Reception” essay that helpfully acknowledges the most important scholarship on his work. The latter also considers literary critics’ frequent debates and evolving understanding of McCarthy’s moral systems, creative processes, and “depictions of place” (9). Given that existing McCarthy criticism “includes many edited collections as well as individual articles that now number in the thousands” (9), the editors do an admirable job of outlining that scholarship without losing their reader in the weeds. The essay sums up by noting that Blood Meridian (1985) and the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Road (2006) have received the most critical attention, and forecasts that future McCarthy scholarship will likely follow the author’s interests in science, biology, social systems, and the unconscious mind.The editors of the volume, Stacey Peebles and Benjamin West, are well equipped to pilot this project. Peebles, a faculty member at Centre College in Kentucky, is familiar to McCarthy scholars as the editor of The Cormac McCarthy Journal and as the author of the 2017 book Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen (University of Texas Press). Like Peebles, co-editor Benjamin West has a great deal of experience teaching McCarthy’s writing, often as a single-author course. A member of the English department at the State University of New York, Delhi, West published a chapter on The Road in his book Crowd Violence in American Modernist Fiction (McFarland, 2013). Peebles and West have selected and organized the contents of the larger Approaches section to help other teachers enjoy the same “challenging, provocative, and rewarding adventure” (20) they experience when teaching McCarthy. His work is “not always easy reading,” the pair admits at the end of the Introduction, but its “difficulties make the moments of shared understanding and discovery all the more exciting” (20).Specifically, the editors have divided the nineteen essays that the Approaches section comprises into three “context” units. The first, “Historical and Cultural Context,” begins with an entry by Peebles herself on McCarthy and the “Question of Violence.” Any person who would teach Blood Meridian in our era of content warnings will benefit from this essay, which also addresses Child of God (1974) and The Road, the latter regarded by Peebles as “the most teachable of McCarthy’s works” (27). Other contributors likewise consider the violence that permeates McCarthy’s fiction and share pedagogical strategies for also confronting its portrait of gender, multiculturalism, the natural environment, competing constructs of time, economics, and power relations. Some essays outline assignments for use in the classroom and suggest critical and theoretical texts to use alongside varied McCarthy works, including All the Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old Men (2005), The Sunset Limited (2006), and The Counselor (2013). Here, as in the sections to follow, each essay numbers about ten pages in length and most include endnotes.Given McCarthy’s famous assertion that “books are made out of books,” readers are often keen to uncover the authors and literature that inspired his celebrated narratives. Others hope to reveal how he revises, challenges, or altogether rejects entrenched literary traditions. The volume’s “Literary Pairings and Context” unit studies McCarthy’s oeuvre against the literary works of other artists and the genres and movements in which they operate. Here experienced educators share how they have made headway in the classroom by teaching McCarthy in connection with southern literature, the western genre, the Mexican corrido, the nineteenth-century Romance tradition, or apocalypse fiction. Perhaps the most innovative chapter in this section, Nicholas Monk’s “Cormac McCarthy Made Me Do It,” details how to lead students to an “embodied, visceral, or haptic response” (124) to McCarthy’s dynamic prose. Monk’s collaborative sensory exercise, which also involves passages by Paul Bowles and Willa Cather, illustrates the power of McCarthy’s words to make the reader “ontologically engaged” (124).While the first two units offer ample ideas for class activities and assignments, the volume’s third and final group of essays, “Classroom Contexts,” delivers the most concentrated presentations on teaching McCarthy’s work. These entries have been selected in part for the breadth of the audiences they cover. Two essayists recount their teaching The Orchard Keeper (1965) and No Country for Old Men to high school and dual-enrollment students, respectively, while another contributor outlines his single-author McCarthy course for graduate students, several of whose reader-response journal entries are included. Still other essays address how to situate McCarthy’s work within the traditional college survey of American literature. The lead-off piece will intrigue readers concerned with the possibilities of digital humanities for literary analysis. Three faculty members from Brigham Young University describe the digital Cormac McCarthy Corpus Project, which can be employed “to interrogate [McCarthy’s writing] for patterns of structure, syntax, and diction while using as large or as narrow a scope as the researchers desire: from one section of one chapter in one book [to] the whole of the corpus” (143).Peebles and West have produced a volume that will more than satisfy the needs of educators. The essays cover all of McCarthy’s major works and sometimes touch on his more obscure ones. Instructors who have taught McCarthy for years will here find fresh perspectives, lesson plans, and discussion prompts for use in the classroom. The volume will also prove valuable to occasional teachers of McCarthy’s books, as well as to bibliographers, librarians, and advanced students wishing to better understand this important American writer. At an efficient 237 pages, Works Cited included, this volume should enjoy a wide circulation. Surely it will find a welcome home on faculty bookshelves, in college and university libraries, and on some graduate school syllabi. Given the heights to which McCarthy’s reputation, readership, and sales have ascended, this volume could not have arrived at a better time.