McCarthy's Work Research Articles

Environmental Degradation and its Metaphors in Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road’: A comparative study with other prominent Narratives

This research provides a comparative literary analysis focusing on Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" within the context of post-apocalyptic literature, emphasizing the novel's unique use of environmental degradation as a central theme. By contrasting McCarthy's work with other prominent narratives in the genre, the study explores the nuanced ways post-apocalyptic literature reflects and influences societal views on environmental issues. "The Road" is distinguished by its stark depiction of a desolate, ash-covered world and its profound exploration of survival's psychological and moral dimensions in the aftermath of an unspecified cataclysm. The analysis reveals McCarthy's subtle yet impactful use of environmental metaphors to delve into themes of hope, despair, human resilience, and the ethical dilemmas survivors face. Through this comparative approach, the research highlights McCarthy's contribution to the broader literary and cultural discourse on environmental degradation, positioning "The Road" as a pivotal work that enriches the genre by emphasizing the interplay between humanity and the natural world. The study underscores the importance of literature in fostering a deeper understanding of environmental stewardship and the urgent need for collective action in the face of ecological crises.

How to Market the Arts: A Practical Approach for the 21st Century by Anthony Rhine and Jay Pension

Reviewed by: How to Market the Arts: A Practical Approach for the 21st Century by Anthony Rhine and Jay Pension James Filippelli How to Market the Arts: A Practical Approach for the 21st Century. Anthony Rhine and Jay Pension. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022; pp. 269. Anthony Rhine and Jay Pension's How to Market the Arts: A Practical Approach for the 21st Century complements Rhine's previous monograph, Theatre Management: Arts Leadership for the 21st Century (2018). This coauthored text provides the reader with valuable information on how to effectively market a theatre in the twenty-first century and will benefit a plethora of undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in performing arts, business, management, or leadership programs. The text is divided into five parts: Marketing versus Engagement, Education, Experience, Environment, and Ease of Access. Rhine and Pension begin each part with a brief overview of the chapters therein. They propose a new paradigm using visual models and case studies of several arts organizations to better explain how nonprofit arts marketing can and should work. They harmonize the four Ps (product, price, place, and promotion) of marketing with the four Es (education, experience, environment, and ease of access) of engagement. Theatre managers and producers will appreciate the importance of marketing and engagement. Rhine and Pension define the process of engagement "as one in which both parties mutually control the interaction and receive roughly equivalent benefits of value" (23). They elaborate on a need to develop a model that is sustainable and successful. Part I, "Marketing versus Engagement," strives to identify shifts in traditional marketing. Chapter 1 highlights researchers and practitioners incorporating different marketing mix concepts. According to Rhine and Pension, engagement is more closely associated with the nonprofit arts and their market exposure than aspects of the conventional marketing mix would suggest. In chapter 2, they discuss the concept of engagement and the connection within the arts and offer practical examples. One illustrative example of engagement is the "Talk Back," which the authors argue needs to be guided and structured. They suggest that a clear understanding of the difference between events that create involvement and those that create engagement is beneficial to arts leaders. In Part II, "Education," Rhine and Pension address the need for theatres to engage with and educate their audiences rather than merely to promote them. Chapter 3 discusses promotion and education. The authors indicate to the reader how important promotion is in the nonprofit sector. This chapter lays the foundation for chapters 4 and 5. In chapter 4, Rhine and Pension present a case study of an arts organization that followed strict promotional methodology without developing any engagement through education. Sadly, after twenty-four years, the arts organization closed its doors. In other words, what not to do! Chapter 5 concludes Part II with highlighting the need for education and the arts. Similarities between education and the arts exist in identifying targets and needs, objectives, and implementation. When one completes reading Part II, it is obvious that education is the key to understanding the audience and the arts organization. Part III, "Experience," explores the difference between experience and the physical product. Chapter 6 describes Jerome McCarthy's framework around the four Ps (product, price, place, and promotion). McCarthy's work demonstrates that both products and services satisfy the needs of individuals; however, Rhine and Pension argue that John Dewey's approach in Art as Experience is "more collaborative and beneficial" (103). Chapter 7 outlines the concept of product relative to arts organizations. The authors elevate experience over product; consequently, "art only occurs in the presence of participation" (138). Chapter 8 clearly and succinctly presents the importance of experience and its appropriateness to the arts. The authors emphasize customer experience, not product, as most important. Part IV, "Environment," investigates the ideas of "place" and "environment." Chapter 9 begins by contrasting the two, with Rhine and Pension arguing that "place has to do with the location where [the] product is being distributed," while environment is meant to convey the "places or surroundings in which arts consumers interact" (159). Though important, this chapter is somewhat dry. Chapter 10 discusses place from interaction to objective, arguing...

The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy

Reviewed by: The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy Siyu Cao Tom McCarthy The Making of Incarnation New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2021. 226 pages. TOM MCCARTHY'S FIFTH novel can be seen as a sequel to his 2015 novel, Satin Island. The narrative of the new book is driven from the perspectives of two characters: Mark Phocan and Monica Dean. The former is employed by a motion-capture specialist company to use digital markers to record volunteers' movement during sex, while the latter, a lawyer at the LSE, investigates whether everyday-life actions can be copyrighted. What connects these two characters is a movie titled The Making of Incarnation and the tracing of "Box 808," which has appeared in American psychologist Lillian Gilbreth's research papers. This missing box is believed by the characters to be the key to disclosing the mechanism of all movements in the universe. A sense of déjà vu might kick in after reading the first three or four chapters. In Satin Island, the protagonist is also employed by a mysterious company to form a "Grand Report" about human behaviors. Undoubtedly, an overflow of technical terms adds an extra touch of charming geekiness to McCarthy's latest novel, and its multithreaded structure manages to generate moderate suspense amid the characters' intellectual adventure. However, the overt similarity between McCarthy's recent two works might invoke a mixed response. On one hand, this is another novel after Satin Island that does not rely on fragmentary plots to drive the narrative forward. Especially for those who are not familiar with McCarthy's style of "storytelling," it would not be easy to get through the first fifty or so pages of smart yet pedantic discourse about copyright law. On the other hand, with whimsical puns glittering between the lines, it has to be admitted that once absorbed into the author's rigorous reasoning and unrivaled sophisticatedness, readers would not be too bothered about whether the characters remain flat and unchanged throughout. The Making of Incarnation is a typical McCarthy novel—instead of telling an exciting story, it is more like an academic report. To question the work's lack of literariness does not necessarily deny its oozing intelligence. For potential readers, whether or not to enjoy McCarthy's latest work depends on what you expect from reading and how you read it. [End Page 79] Siyu Cao Shanghai International Studies University Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Editor's Introduction

The Cormac McCarthy Society looks forward to an exciting year, with an international conference in Dublin from June 14–17, 2022, and a stateside conference in Savannah, at the DeSoto Hotel, September 21–23, 2022. Save the dates, if you haven't already!If you'd like more information about these conferences, you can visit the Society's new website, www.cormacmccarthysociety.com, where we're posting regular updates about events, McCarthy-related news, resources for readers and scholars, and new books—like Lydia Cooper's Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature, which is also reviewed in this issue. The Society's first website, www.cormacmccarthy.com, and its longtime discussion forum, will remain active, though the new site will be the place to go for announcements, conference CFPs and registration, and joining the Society.In this issue, we see a typically wide variety of approaches to McCarthy's work. John Vanderheide kicks us off with a consideration of how German writers, and the idea of Germanic heritage, influence Blood Meridian and shape the novel's aesthetic, theological, and political concerns. Following that, Brian Schill thinks through the parallels of Blood Meridian's Judge Holden and Michel Foucault, particularly the latter's ideas about neoliberal economics. After those explorations of the novel's resonance with European traditions and thinkers, Trevor Jackson reads Child of God in the context of social responsibility and conceptions of modernity more broadly. And Italian scholar Federico Bellini investigates McCarthy's creative process in his composition of The Crossing, particularly his consultation with two medical advisers in crafting his story. Finally, Bryan Giemza reviews Lydia Cooper's new book and, in that discussion, engages with the intersection of humanistic scholarship about narrative and complexity theory as a practice. Enjoy, and keep in touch.

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

“You don't have to do this”: Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and the Courage to Be

Abstract This article engages debate on how Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men (2005) grapples with what it means to live a life of courage in the face of existential threats by exploring the motives behind key moral choices made by main characters Anton Chigurh and Ed Tom Bell. With support from Paul Tillich's 1952 book The Courage to Be, the article finds that the primary intention behind these characters' choices is to protect themselves against the existential anxiety of self-condemnation. This reading contests notions that Chigurh either has no sense of moral responsibility or aims to evade it, and that Bell's story is one of moral cowardice to the end, concluding that the author's vision meets challenges presented by overwhelming external forces rather than resigning to them. These results may serve future research about self-affirmation in McCarthy's work.

Cormac McCarthy in Context

Cormac McCarthy in Context

Editor's Introduction

Covid-19 has slowed a lot of things down—including our McCarthy conferences, which we're in the process of planning for the U.S. sometime in the 2021–22 academic year, and Dublin for June 2022—but not, apparently, McCarthy scholarship. Submissions to the journal have continued apace over the last year, even increasing over the typical average, so it's edifying to see that good thinking about good literature remains a touchstone.This issue brings together scholars from several different countries with a variety of new angles on McCarthy's work. Rachel Griffis leads the issue with a piece on Llewelyn Moss and Tom Sawyer, building on previous work that examines Twain's influence but more often focuses on Huck Finn. Joey Isaac Jenkins follows with an article exploring the relationship between interspecies violence and queer desire in the Border Trilogy, opening new possibilities for queer readings of McCarthy. Joakim Hermansson and Tore Rye Anderson both analyze the dialogue between the father and son in The Road—Hermansson emphasizing the dramaturgical rhythms evident in the use of the word “okay” and the creation of an “adulthood code” and Anderson engaging with the father's own storytelling in the novel, and how he creates a plot that moves him and his son forward. Finally, Ryan Crane's article on Blood Meridian offers a new reading of the judge's tale about the harnessmaker—a cryptic and often unaddressed section of the book—and the death of the kid by unpacking the influence of Frazer's The Golden Bough.This issue concludes with a review of Cambridge University Press's new collection Cormac McCarthy in Context, edited by Steven Frye, and reviewed here by Naomi Morgenstern.

“The carnage in the woods”: Queerness and Interspecies Violence in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy

ABSTRACT Considerations of the queer thematics of McCarthy's work remain scant, and interpretations of the novels of the Border Trilogy—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—commonly elide the presence of queer affect. At the same time, theorizations of violence in McCarthy's novels are abundant. Through reading interspecies violence as an expression of queer desire, this article exposes the centrality of queerness to the function and production of violence in the Border Trilogy. I contend that the queer presences in the Border Trilogy produce new insights into our reading of interspecies violence and creates nuance in our understanding of the relationship between transgressive desire and violence in McCarthy's wider corpus.

Rick Wallach's Aboriginal Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West

Abstract Rick Wallach, founder of the Cormac McCarthy Society, first discovered the author in 1992, when he picked up a copy of Blood Meridian in Adelaide, Australia, and read it on an overnight train to Alice Springs. That began Wallach's deep engagement with McCarthy's work, which he would enthusiastically press upon friends and unsuspecting strangers. Here, Peter Jospyh tells the story of that auspicious meeting, and what happened to that original “Australian railroad copy” of Blood Meridian in its later years.

Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature

Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature

“Things happen to you they happen”: Cormac McCarthy, Morality, and Neo-Naturalism

Abstract This article examines elements of determinism and naturalism in Cormac McCarthy's twenty-first-century novels, No Country for Old Men and The Road. While naturalism has been noted in McCarthy's work prior to these novels, this article contends that the character and strength of naturalism has changed in the most recent works. This change is placed in the general context of naturalist theory, as well as what the article argues is a more general resurgence of naturalism in American culture post-9/11. In particular, this article examines the implications in McCarthy's work for the extent to which the deterministic dimension of naturalism prevents us from judging characters morally, since they exercise at best highly limited free will. The article provides a detailed analysis of this phenomenon in the two novels, and also uses this to place them in the wider American and global twenty-first-century context.

Robert Coles and Cormac McCarthy: A Case Study of Literary Patronage

ABSTRACT This article draws on the extensive archives of Robert Coles, the records of the Lyndhurst Foundation, and other archival collections to explore Coles's and others' patronage of Cormac McCarthy from 1968 through 1986. Drawn to McCarthy's work through his interest in Appalachian writers, especially those of a spiritual bent, Coles wrote reviews of Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree for the New Yorker and wrote in support of McCarthy's 1976 Guggenheim fellowship. Soon after, he initiated a correspondence and friendship with McCarthy. Learning that McCarthy's financial situation was hindering his work, Coles facilitated his receiving a Lyndhurst fellowship, with support of $20,000 annually in late 1979, 1980, and 1981. Then he promoted Lyndhurst's copublishing Suttree in trade paperback in 1986. Finally, a case can be made that Coles influenced McCarthy's receipt of a MacArthur fellowship in 1981. Working almost invisibly behind the scenes, Coles had a great deal to do with McCarthy's surviving his leanest years.

Editor's Introduction

At the time of this writing, the Cormac McCarthy Society is planning our next conference, to be held August 29 through September 1, 2019, in Austin, Texas. We'll return to the downtown Hilton, the site of our conference in 2017, right in the midst of Austin's funky restaurant and music scene. The Hilton conference rate for single or double rooms is $199 a night. If you'd like to reserve a room, you can call the Hilton at 512-482-8000 and give the group code “COR,” or you can go to this website: https://book.passkey.com/go/CormacMcCarthy.We'll post more information on cormacmccarthy.com as we have it. Hope to see you there!This Spring 2019 issue of The Cormac McCarthy Journal serendipitously brings together some long-familiar names in McCarthy studies. Dave Holloway, author of the 2002 touchstone work The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, turns his critical eye to post 9/11 neoconservatism as a salient context for The Road. We are also pleased to feature Béatrice Trotignon's bibliography of translations of McCarthy's work, an expansion of the bibliography of French translations that she first shared back in 1997 on the Cormac McCarthy Society website, and a fascinating compendium of information. Dianne Luce and Wes Morgan, perhaps two of the best-known names in our field, each offer a brief note—on McCarthy's source for the concept of “optical democracy” and on young Charlie McCarthy's audition for a movie role, respectively. Luke Mills, a newer McCarthy scholar, is in good company, then, with his contribution—a examination of Blood Meridian in light of medieval fairy lore, an interesting and fresh approach to this much-discussed novel.Finally, this issue includes reviews of two recent publications: Brad Bannon and John Vanderheide's edited collection Cormac McCarthy's Violent Destinies and Michael Crews's already well-known Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences. As has been the case for some time, the production of new work on McCarthy continues apace.Enjoy, and keep in touch.

Mapping McCarthy in the Age of Neoconservatism, or the Politics of Affect in The Road

Abstract This article suggests that in a reading environment weighted down by the neoconservative hegemony of the time, when considered at the level of affect—as politics enacted at the level of feeling, or as ideology experienced at a level that is prior to articulation in language—the act of reading The Road might well have worked for some readers as a powerful affirmation of post-9/11 neoconservatism. This suggestion that McCarthy's prose in The Road might embody, disseminate, and assist in the naturalizing of neoconservative structures of feeling is not, then, a claim about authorial intent. Rather, this article is interested in the reception of McCarthy's work, or at least the range of possible receptions by readers—the political uses, conscious or otherwise, to which contemporary readers might put McCarthy's prose—in a specific historical time and place as a metabolizing of historical experience, or lived ideology, in the form of literary fiction.

Enhancing context knowledge repositories with justifiable exceptions

Dealing with context dependent knowledge is a well-known area of study that roots in John McCarthy's seminal work. More recently, the Contextualized Knowledge Repository (CKR) framework has been conceived as a logic-based approach in which knowledge bases have a two layered structure, modeled by a global context and a set of local contexts. The global context not only contains the meta-knowledge defining the properties of local contexts, but also holds the global (context independent) object knowledge that is shared by all of the local contexts. In many practical cases, however, it is desirable to leave the possibility to “override” the global object knowledge at the local level: in other words, it is interesting to recognize the pieces of knowledge that can admit exceptional instances in the local contexts that do not need to satisfy the general axiom. To address this need, we present in this paper an extension of CKR in which defeasible axioms can be included in the global context. The latter are verified in the local contexts only for the instances for which no exception to overriding exists, where exceptions require a justification in terms of facts that are provable from the knowledge base. We formally define this semantics and study some semantic and computational properties, where we characterize the complexity of the major reasoning tasks, among them satisfiability testing, instance checking, and conjunctive query answering. Furthermore, we present a translation of extended CKRs with knowledge bases in the Description Logic SROIQ-RL under the novel semantics to datalog programs under the stable model (answer set) semantics. We also present an implementation prototype and examine its scalability with respect to the size of the input CKR and the amount (level) of defeasibility in experiments. Finally, we compare our representation approach with some major formalisms for expressing defeasible knowledge in Description Logics and contextual knowledge representation. Our work adds to the body of results on using deductive database technology such as SQL and datalog in these areas, and provides an expressive formalism (in terms of intrinsic complexity) for exception handling by overriding.

Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen

Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen

Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author

Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author

Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories

Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories

Editor's Introduction

The last issue of The Cormac McCarthy Journal was a significant one, as it was our first with Penn State University Press. This one also marks a transition—in 2016, CMJ begins biannual publication. It's a nice development for our readers, who I hope will enjoy the more frequent installments of this ongoing conversation about McCarthy's work, and also for authors. As the number of submissions has increased over the years, sometimes it was a year or more between an article's acceptance and its appearance in print. Now that timeline will be appropriately speedier.The 2015 issue appeared just in time for “Fifty Years of Cormac McCarthy,” a conference held at the University of Memphis that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of McCarthy's first novel The Orchard Keeper. With presentations covering that novel as well as McCarthy's other works, an evening keynote by Brian Evenson, and a good helping of Memphis barbeque, the conference was, as always, a great time and a wonderful opportunity to see the new directions that McCarthy scholarship is taking. This summer, July 7–9, 2016, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin will host the conference “Crossroads and Transgressions: Cormac McCarthy between Worlds,” which is co-organized with the University of Cologne, the University of Paderborn, and the Cormac McCarthy Society. (For more information and to see the call for papers, go to http://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/en/v/McCarthy/index.html.) Finally, the Society plans to organize another U.S. conference for Fall 2017, so stay tuned for more information as that comes together.In the following pages, Casey Jergenson continues a discussion of The Road and capitalism that was begun in a different vein by Jordan Dominy in the last issue. James Christie brings Heidegger to bear on Blood Meridian, and Brad Bannon uses that novel as well as No Country for Old Men to trace McCarthy's “theory of agency.” Harriet Poppy Stilley investigates both masculine and feminine agency as represented in Child of God, and Russell M. Hillier offers a reconsideration of John Grady Cole's heroism, particularly as seen in Cities of the Plain, the third novel of the Border Trilogy. And finally, Steven Knepper contributes what I believe is only the second published article on McCarthy's most recent work, The Counselor, and reads that narrative in light of theories of tragedy. (It's worth noting that the first piece on this screenplay was published by another of our authors here, Russell M. Hillier, in The Explicator, and is also an excellent read.) Though we don't have a book review in this issue, we'll have one or more forthcoming in the next. As we continue biannual publication, we may expand our book reviews to include monographs or collections that range beyond the exclusive study of McCarthy, and so please do be in touch if you have suggestions on that score.Enjoy, and keep in touch.