“What the Hell Is a Flowery Boundary Tree?” Gunslinger, All the Pretty Horses and the Postmodern Western

Abstract

What is the function of a map, and what role does mapping perform in a literary text? This essay interrogates the use of maps and mapping, the influence and impact of capital and the construction of nationhood, and considers what it means to be an American in Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses and Edward Dorn's Gunslinger. The argument links the project pursued in these two westerns to larger geopolitical issues, whilst fully addressing the specificity and difference of the texts and their individual forms, structures and contents. Postmodern geographical theory is applied to the two books to provide a new theory of the way that land and territory are employed in the western.

‘Movement/occurs at the split’: Turning to late modernity in Edward Dorn’s ‘North Atlantic Turbine’

“…Movement, which "occurs", and is permanent, exists "at the split" between the ground, the "actual earth" whether you hold it to be of value or no, and the trajectory of the turbine it moves over the ground but isn't made of it. (Savage, 2012) The only hope for the old, phenomenal order which exists in place, rather than in the descriptions, the spatial stories, of the turbine, is that Dorn's anger and his occasional viscera have awoken a feeling for it, a sense-memory of sympathy, somewhere in the reader -but he is not hopeful. Although profoundly political, this is not an advocational poem; after all, Dorn has already told us that " it starts of course/ with the finished product" (ll.…”