Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion

Hoberek, Andrew

doi:10.1093/alh/ajr019

Cited by 47 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Ultimately, she gave up and took a bullet: "She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift" [30]. As Andrew Hoberek notes, "the wife committed suicide… not because she is a weak woman but because she succumbed to a deadening coincidence between the imagination and reality" [18]. In other words, what the mother experienced between imagination and reality is her inability to verbalize and create an understanding of what is happening in nature.…”

Section: The Questions Of the Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

America’s Future as a Wasteland in Cormac McCarthy’s <i>The Road</i> (2007)

El-Sobky¹

2020

CLS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cormac McCarthy's The Road presents an awesome future vision of America as a wasteland. It predicts the American nightmare in the future. There is unknown catastrophe has ruined the earth and destroyed human civilization. McCarthy believes that human beings are constantly aware of the influence of nature on their lives in the form of the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat. Ecocriticism is an appropriate critical approach to The Road because there is a strong presence of nature and environment throughout his work; and because of the great influence of nature and environment on the thoughts and actions of the characters. All over the scenes of the novel from the very beginning till the end, the terrifying atmosphere dominates the events. McCarthy focuses only on the enmity of nature for human beings by looking at the negative side. He chooses to talk about American nightmare instead of American dream. He seems to warn the Americans not to feel safe all the time depending on what is called the American Dream which can be changed to American nightmare.

show abstract

Section: The Questions Of the Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

America’s Future as a Wasteland in Cormac McCarthy’s <i>The Road</i> (2007)

El-Sobky¹

2020

CLS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The Road by Cormac McCarthy attracted much critical attention after its publication. In their scholarly works, researchers discuss the relationships between ethics, religion, and morality (Wielenberg, 2010;Guo, 2015), aspects of the aesthetics of exhaustion (Hoberek, 2011), dynamics of descriptions of space and landscape (Ellis, 2006;Graulund, 2010), the dialectics of mobility (Schleusener, 2017) or stylistic aspects of the novel (Englender and Gome, 2015). Some works have also analyzed the theme of cannibalism in the novel, for example, the relation between anthropophagy depicted in The Road and ecological cannibalism (Huebert, 2017) or the relation between consuming human flesh and the interplay of human / nature binary and consumer society (Estes, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dystopian future and borders of humanity Analyzing «The Road» (2006) by Cormac McCarthy and «Pomyrana» (2016) by Taras Antypovych

Mozolevska

2023

Synopsis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The article explores the artistic means of representation of the degradation of food practices in the post-apocalyptic literary discourse of contemporary writers. The study focuses on the strategies of food culture degradation in the post-humanist discourse of two novels — Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and Taras Antypovych’s “Pomyrana”. Using interpretative and comparative methods, the article aims to concentrate on the existential issues of the novels and compare the artistic means of depicting the moral degradation of humanity and the decline of food culture in “The Road” and “Pomyrana”. The research results affirm that the portrayal of food not only highlights the struggle for survival but also carries symbolic and metaphorical significance. Both authors use the issue of food supply to reflect the collective anxieties of modern society and to link the issue of moral degradation and the survival of human beings. Food imagery is used to describe possible means of survival for the protagonists in the post-apocalyptic world, symbolizes the lost world (“The Road”) and reflects the inner moral state of a community (“Pomyrana”). The expression “you are what you eat” has a special significance in these texts — in Pomyrana the semi-robotized people eat inedible substances to satisfy their animalistic hunger, eventually turning to cannibalism, which reflects their deep moral degradation. In “The Road”, the protagonists continuously choose starvation over cannibalism, spending their time looking for pre-apocalyptic food and for a chance at survival. In this case, cannibalism is presented as a liminal food practice of “bad people”. The novelty of the article lies in the comparative approach to analyzing how food-related discourse is portrayed throughout the novels and what cannibalism reveals about both the characters and society as a whole. Thus, cannibalism serves as a means to construct the boundary between human and inhuman, defines categories of good and evil, and illustrates the moral orientations of the heroes in the analyzed novels.

show abstract