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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´.

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Contents

Acknowledgements9

Preface11

Part I: Narratives and Counternarratives

1The Power of Narrative19

Connect the Dots20

Closure and Emplotment24

Narrative, Legitimacy, Force28

Untranscendable Horizons30

2Counternarrative Possibilities38

The Historicist Origins of the Counternarrative39

Two Conceptions of Society44

The Roles of Negation49

"Complicity Battling Redemption": Counternarrative Tactics58

Negative Closure68

3American Studies and the Virgin Land Myth74

Indian-Hating and the Logic of Fetishism75

The Myth and Symbol School´s "Doctrine of Doubleness"87

American Unexceptionalism: Violation and Revisionism93

"The Entire Planet as a Unit of Analysis": Postnationalism and the New Americanists100

4American Studies and the Homeland Myth108

The National ´Wound´109

The Rhetoric of Rupture118

The Eternal Homecoming126

Metanostalgia134

Part II:Cormac McCarthy´s Westerns Strings and Mazes: Introducing Cormac McCarthy141

5Blood Meridian and the Misrule of Law151

Violence, Law, Westerns153

The Primordial Crime161

Judge Holden´s Economy of Justice167

The Horror of the Real173

6Aesthetic Coldness177

"Things Are Seldom What They Seem": Blood Meridian´s Anti-Realism178

Into the Grand Hotel Abyss182

The Violence of Form185

The Monster of Reason189
7Blood Meridian´s Dangerous Absolutes193

The Historical Absolute194

The Desert Absolute198

Absolute Instability202

Mutual Accountability207

8Saving Romance from ´America´ in the Border Trilogy210

"Another World Entire": The Americanization of Romance211

Reading the Border Trilogy through American Studies219

Radical Longing and Fugitive Time227

"Ten Thousand Worlds for the Choosing"232

9From Pastiche to Tragedy238

Suffering Beyond Pastiche: Genre and Post-Postmodernism240

Mourning the Sublime250

"That Which Is and Must Be": The Punishment of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham252

The Deconsecration of Capital261

Conclusion: Perilous Ground267

Between Loss and Longing271

Perilous Ground281

Bibliography284

Index302

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"Dorson provides an eloquent encapsulation of scholarly approaches regarding the affirmation and subversion of romantic narratives in the novels. And throughout he offers wonderful connections to Herman Melville and James Joyce." E. Hage, SUNY Cobleskill (Choice, 01.04.2017)

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