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  • Cormac McCarthy in transformacija žanrov [Elektronski vir] = Cormac McCarthy and genre transformation : doktorska disertacija
    Mavri, Kristjan
    In this doctoral thesis, entitled Cormac McCarthy and Genre Transformation, I investigate the relationship between the novels of contemporary American author Cormac McCarthy and literary genre. In ... investigating this relationship, I attempt to give insight into McCarthy's practice of using genre to articulate and confirm a complex of ideas from different fictional and historical angles. Chapter one proposes a concept of literary genre informed by work done in the field of cognitive linguistics by Eleanor Rosch, George Lakoff and others. Rather than traditional category structure, where categories form discrete entities characterized by a set of attributes shared by all members equally, genres can be described as having a prototype structure. That is, genres are not homogenous; they have more and less representative members and permeable borders. Texts in a genre need not share the same set of attributes, but can be linked by family resemblance. We judge genre membership on the basis of exemplars-texts that best represent the genre as a whole. The incongruence between the expectations based on such typical examples and what we encounter gives rise to prototypicality effects. Furthermore, chapter one applies George Lakoff's explanation for prototype effects, namely, his concept of idealized cognitive models, to generic categorization. Such an understanding of genre, which lays out the ways whereby writers and readers use genre rather than some formal system of logic, is well suited to McCarthy's innovative work in Southern Gothic, Western and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Chapter two addresses the features of the Southern Gothic, a genre of American literature set in the U.S. South which typically uses the grotesque, dark humor, character deformity, extreme violence, sacrilege and perversion to say something about the Southern social reality or the human condition more generally. McCarthy's first four novels, The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God and Suttree, are then read in terms of how they are similar to and different from the exemplars of the Southern Gothic, primarily works by Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. Chapter three looks at the Western tradition in American literature and its ideological engagement with the myth of the West. McCarthy's Westerns, Blood Meridian: or The Evening Redness in the West, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain and No Country for Old Men, are characterized by their mythoclastic treatment of the ideas iv the Western has traditionally articulated, such as American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. At the same time, McCarthy's Western works demonstrate more prominently the author's growing predilection for embodying certain universal ideas, such as the relationship between agency and fate, the existence of a transcendent realm, the role of narrative in human life, the problem of evil, in specific generic and historic contexts. Chapter four analyzes the structure of post-apocalyptic fiction and the ways in which it has allowed generations of writers and readers to project apocalyptic futures based on historically contingent anxieties and fantasies. McCarthy's The Road adds to the existing genre model a singularly bleak representation of natural and social collapse, which the author redeems through an intimate love story between a nameless father and son, whose grim struggle for survival in a dying world becomes a philosophical existential quest for meaning and hope in a hollowed-out world. The concluding chapter synthesizes the findings of the preceding chapters, arguing McCarthy uses generic frameworks in ways that facilitate his, more or less consistent, inquiries into the metaphysical, epistemological, religious and moral mysteries of human existence and creation itself.
    Vrsta gradiva - disertacija ; neleposlovje za odrasle
    Založništvo in izdelava - Ljubljana : [K. Mavri], 2017
    Jezik - angleški
    COBISS.SI-ID - 65968226

Knjižnica/institucija Kraj Akronim Za izposojo Druga zaloga
FF, Osrednja humanistična knjižnica, Ljubljana Ljubljana FFLJ v čitalnico 1 izv.
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