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Mementoes of the broken body: Cormac McCarthy’s aesthetic politics
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Laug, Katja (2019) Mementoes of the broken body: Cormac McCarthy’s aesthetic politics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3453556~S15
Abstract
This thesis analyses representations of the broken body in Cormac McCarthy’s novels. McCarthy presents bodies remarkable in their unwholesomeness, often marked by wounds and scars, alcoholism and illness, or forms of monstrosity. The majority of these bodies exist in marginalised spaces at the fringe of mainstream society, and the markings on their bodies correlate to their lifestyle. Expanding upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to include a broader understanding of class structures, this thesis demonstrates how McCarthy connects an aesthetics of the body to class hierarchies, categorising the unbeautiful body as lower class and the beautiful body as upper class.
Using the screenplay The Gardener’s Son to illustrate the theoretical nuances, Chapter One introduces the overall thesis and the underlying theoretical approach. The project expands the sociology of Bourdieu to include the poor and marginalised under- and lower class, and forms a dialogue with Foucault’s work on biopolitics and criminality, as well as Nietzsche’s approach to morality. This reading of the body within class and power hierarchies analyses the dynamics of class and power through an aesthetics of the body, and forms of community and resistance to society’s dominant power structures.
Chapter Two utilises the theory of the aesthetic politics of the body to read wounded and scarred characters in Suttree and the Border Trilogy. I locate selected characters’ positions within the class hierarchy. This application of the theory allows for an understanding both of power hegemonies and the mechanics of their reinforcement, for example through law-enforcement, as well as delineating forms of resistance against systems of power, such as community and kindness. Similarly, Chapter Three traces power structures, class hierarchies, and forms of resistance through a reading of drunk and sick bodies in The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Suttree, and Cities of the Plain.
Chapters Four and Five offer readings of monstrous bodies in the Appalachian works, Outer Dark and Child of God, and the Southwestern novels, Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, respectively. Whereas Chapters Two and Three consider the potential for unity and community amongst the lower classes, Chapters Four and Five read monstrosity as a signifier of division and ostracism, as well as visible manifestation of the corruption generated within and by hegemonic systems of power and associated hierarchical social structures.
McCarthy’s latest novel The Road is the focus of the postscript in Chapter Six. Situated in a post-apocalyptic, post-societal environment, the body-politics evident throughout the preceding nine novels do not apply to the social structures in The Road. Whereas McCarthy revisits tropes of illness, community, and monstrosity in The Road, the Postscript offers an adjusted reading of collapsed societal and power structures.
My research shows that this system of classifying the body reveals McCarthy’s concern with a politics of the body that underlies American social hierarchies and power structures, an approach that has hitherto received little attention in McCarthy criticism.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) P Language and Literature > PS American literature |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | McCarthy, Cormac, 1933- -- Criticism and interpretation, Human body (Philosophy), Wounds and injuries -- Fiction, Aesthetics -- Political aspects | ||||
Official Date: | July 2019 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Monk, Nicholas ; Docherty, Thomas, 1955- | ||||
Format of File: | |||||
Extent: | vii, 282 leaves | ||||
Language: | eng |
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