Papers by Amara Speechley
This thesis aims to draw on a selection of earlier literature from American author Cormac McCarth... more This thesis aims to draw on a selection of earlier literature from American author Cormac McCarthy, to show the ways in which he manipulates narrative to destabilise social and cultural ideologies of truth and reality. The novels examined within this scope will be: Outer Dark; Child of God; Blood Meridian and the three novels forming The Border Trilogy. In creating universes that both parody society through mimesis, and yet are ultimately haunted by perverse representations considered socially taboo, McCarthy’s novels can be read as grotesque performances of the societal constructs that predicate and propagate ideals of normative identification. His evocation and then transcendence of traditional modes of genre resound with theoretical inquiries that invite reconsideration to the way language is used and understood. Relying upon McCarthy’s engagement with such methods and motifs reserved as being socially taboo; namely death, necrophilia, incest, and also the deconstruction of genre, this study aims to examine how his preoccupation with the ‘other’ within language, resists and destabilises the discursive limits that proliferate the idea of a singular, ultimate encompassing reality. Whilst all of McCarthy’s novels in various ways resound with these notions, brevity within the confines of this thesis has meant that only a selection can be explored. The collection chosen here, spanning from the late 1960s through to the mid- 1990s, all display a duality that speaks more to poststructuralist inquiry than the restrictive parameters of historical, theological or nationalistic thematics too often linked to McCarthy’s work.
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Papers by Amara Speechley