In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Würzburg, language: English, abstract: The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s tenth and Pulitzer Prize winning novel, tells the story of an unnamed man and his son, trying to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe that left Earth stuck in atomic winter, where nearly all animals and plants are extinct, ashes are falling from the sky and the ground is burned and barren. Following the road throughout the country their goal is to reach the coast in hope for a better future. On their way they constantly struggle with starvation, sickness and the threat of thieves and cannibals that roam the road. Except for some clothes and the food they find in abandoned houses and supermarkets, they have nothing but each other to hold on to. The novel follows these two characters on their journey through a post-apocalyptic America, seeing how the catastrophe ripped apart civilization and turned most of the people that are still alive into cannibalistic savages that do anything to survive and have practically abandoned any kind of moral. In contrast to that, the man and his son still follow a moral code, albeit the father doesn’t follow it as strictly as the son does. But in an environment like this, where people do whatever it takes to ensure their survival, having morals and values gets the man and his son in several dangerous situations, yet they stick to their believes and insist that they are the “good guys“ in a world full of “bad guys”. In this seminar paper I will discuss the role of morals in the novel, especially in the lives of the man, his son and the savages they encounter on their way. Where does the faith in these morals come from? In what situations does the father abandon this code and why? I will also consider the advantages and disadvantages that morals and values have for the two and why they still insist, even after witnessing some extremely brutal situations, to continue “carrying the fire” through a world where the human race is on the verge of extinction and even God seems to not care anymore. Is there any hope left for a world where morals could mean something again or do the man and his son ultimately fight for a lost cause?
From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road comes a taut, expansively imagined drama about four generations of an American family. The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw, a man who knows that "true masonry is not held together by cement but...by the warp of the world." Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken—or dishonored—the family trade, Cormac McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction: precise observation of the physical world; language that has the bite of common speech and the force of Biblical prose; and a breathtaking command of the art of storytelling. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Wurzburg, language: English, abstract: The Road, Cormac McCarthy's tenth and Pulitzer Prize winning novel, tells the story of an unnamed man and his son, trying to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe that left Earth stuck in atomic winter, where nearly all animals and plants are extinct, ashes are falling from the sky and the ground is burned and barren. Following the road throughout the country their goal is to reach the coast in hope for a better future. On their way they constantly struggle with starvation, sickness and the threat of thieves and cannibals that roam the road. Except for some clothes and the food they find in abandoned houses and supermarkets, they have nothing but each other to hold on to. The novel follows these two characters on their journey through a post-apocalyptic America, seeing how the catastrophe ripped apart civilization and turned most of the people that are still alive into cannibalistic savages that do anything to survive and have practically abandoned any kind of moral. In contrast to that, the man and his son still follow a moral code, albeit the father doesn't follow it as strictly as the son does. But in an environment like this, where people do whatever it takes to ensure their survival, having morals and values gets the man and his son in several dangerous situations, yet they stick to their believes and insist that they are the "good guys" in a world full of "bad guys." In this seminar paper I will discuss the role of morals in the novel, especially in the lives of the man, his son and the savages they encounter on their way. Where does the faith in these morals come from? In what situations does the father abandon this code and why? I will also consider the advantages and disadvantages that morals and values have for the two and why they still insist, even after w
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Critics often trace the prevailing mood of despair and purported nihilism in the works of Cormac McCarthy to the striking absence of interior thought in his seemingly amoral characters. In No More Heroes, however, Lydia Cooper reveals that though McCarthy limits inner revelations, he never eliminates them entirely. In certain crucial cases, he endows his characters with ethical decisions and attitudes, revealing a strain of heroism exists in his otherwise violent and apocalyptic world. Cooper evaluates all of McCarthy's work to date, carefully exploring the range of his narrative techniques. The writer's overwhelmingly distant, omniscient third-person narrative rarely shifts to a more limited voice. When it does deviate, however, revelations of his characters' consciousness unmistakably exhibit moral awareness and ethical behavior. The quiet, internal struggles of moral men such as John Grady Cole in the Border Trilogy and the father in The Road demonstrate an imperfect but very human heroism. Even when the writing moves into the minds of immoral characters, McCarthy draws attention to the characters' humanity, forcing the perceptive reader to identify with even the most despicable representatives of the human race. Cooper shows that this rare yet powerful recognition of commonality and the internal yearnings for community and a commitment to justice or compassion undeniably exist in McCarthy's work. No More Heroes directly addresses the essential question about McCarthy's brutal and morally ambiguous universe and reveals poignant new answers.
This collection shows how Cormac McCarthy's The Road reacts aesthetically to many of the ethical, ontological, and political concerns that define our times.
This book argues that McCarthy’s works convey a profound moral vision, and use intertextuality, moral philosophy, and questions of genre to advance that vision. It focuses upon the ways in which McCarthy’s fiction is in ceaseless conversation with literary and philosophical tradition, examining McCarthy’s investment in influential thinkers from Marcus Aurelius to Hannah Arendt, and poets, playwrights, and novelists from Dante and Shakespeare to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Antonio Machado. The book shows how McCarthy’s fiction grapples with abiding moral and metaphysical issues: the nature and problem of evil; the idea of God or the transcendent; the credibility of heroism in the modern age; the question of moral choice and action; the possibility of faith, hope, love, and goodness; the meaning and limits of civilization; and the definition of what it is to be human. This study will appeal alike to readers, teachers, and scholars of Cormac McCarthy.
Are lawyers, by their very nature, agents of the state, of capital, of institutions of power? Or are there ways in which they can work constructively or transformatively for the disempowered, the working class, the underprivileged? Lawyers in a Postmodern World explores how lawyers actively create the forms of power which they and others deploy. Through engaging case studies, the book examines how lawyers work within and for powerful institutions and provides suggestions--both general and practical--for ways in which the practice of law can be made to work with and for the powerless. Individuals chapters address such subjects as the contradictions of radical law practice; legal work in South Africa; the economics and politics of negotiating justice; feminist legal scholarship and women's gendered lives; the overlapping worlds of law, business, and politics; theories of legal practice; and how lawyers are constitutive of gender relations. Contributing to the book are Maureen Cain (University of West Indies), Yves Dezalay (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France), Martha Fineman (Columbia University), Sue Lees (University of North London), Doreen McBarnet (Wolfson College, Oxford), Frank Munger (SUNY, Buffalo), Wilfried Scharf (University of Cape Town), Stuart Scheingold (University of Washington), David Sugarman (Lancaster University), and Sally Wheeler (University of Nottingham).
Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 3,3 (1,3), University of Paderborn (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: "It's 'the end of the world' as we know it": The Apocalypse and other End-of-the-World Narratives, language: English, abstract: In this essay I’d like to take a look at social interactions of individuals who find themselves in a world where known values, believes and rules seem to be invalid and where the individual survival seems to be the only aim to strive for. But is survival the only need of people? The Road, with its cold, bitter and ashen world, where ethics and morale are lost, where “society”, as we know it, is completely absent is a good basis for this research. “Maybe you’ll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.” (McCarthy, The Road) “Action is rational in so far as it pursues ends possible within the conditions of the situation, and by means, which, among those available to the actor, are intrinsically best adapted to the end for reasons(...).” (Parsons, 1937) These two epigraphs, the first from Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and the second from Parsons “Structure of Social Action” give us a slight hint about the importance of social relations and interactions and their outcomes. As a consumer of this kind of post-apocalyptic media you’re thrown into these settings by either waking up from a dream or by regaining consciousness. The setting and the “new world order” are already fixed. Either people try to survive for their own while searching and hoping for “others” in order to have a higher chance of surviving, or they are already a part of a community which fights against others in order to survive. In both cases, on the other hand, those “communities” already do exist and in both cases it’s always a question of the “good” against the “bad”. While dealing with post-apocalyptic media several questions came to my mind. How came those communities and groupings and into being? Which role do social interactions and social relations play in order to form a new kind of social system(s), after the (previous-) known world-order got destroyed by an apocalyptic event? Social sciences usually deal with the reasons of social interactions and relations. But they depend on existent fixed social values, rules, laws, morale and religious believes, since those aspects influence the actions of each and every individual.