“All These Good Men”: Cornelius Suttree as Messiah of the Knoxville Netherworld in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This essay begins with Franco Morreti’s comment that the ideology underpinning the Bildungsroman constitutes “an escape from freedom.” It then applies this problem to Cormac McCarthy’s late-modernist novel Suttree (1979). Suttree takes the form of the Kunstlerroman , a variant of the Bildungsroman , and tells the story of Cornelius Suttree, a disaffected drifter, with artistic leanings, living on a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late forties, early nineteen fifties. The aim is to trace the various existentialist themes in Suttree as a way of understanding McCarthy’s late-modernist response to a post-war America that has no place for the artist-dreamer, the typical hero of the classic Kuntstlerroman . In dialectical terms, the images of pollution and waste that accrue in the novel can be interpreted as metaphorical stages of transformation that aid the hero’s ‘escape to freedom.’ During the course of the novel, McCarthy pits various existentialisms, mainly of the religious and Sartrean kind, against each other as a way of highlighting the choices on offer for this besieged artist. The late-modernist Kuntstlerroman can only offer a fragmented transfiguration. Therefore, in the refusebeatnik figure of Cornelius Suttree we see a new Kunstler -figure emerging: an artist bricoleur piecing together a new mosaic out of a decaying and shattered social order.
Abstract
This essay begins with Franco Morreti’s comment that the ideology underpinning the Bildungsroman constitutes “an escape from freedom.” It then applies this problem to Cormac McCarthy’s late-modernist novel Suttree (1979). Suttree takes the form of the Kunstlerroman , a variant of the Bildungsroman , and tells the story of Cornelius Suttree, a disaffected drifter, with artistic leanings, living on a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late forties, early nineteen fifties. The aim is to trace the various existentialist themes in Suttree as a way of understanding McCarthy’s late-modernist response to a post-war America that has no place for the artist-dreamer, the typical hero of the classic Kuntstlerroman . In dialectical terms, the images of pollution and waste that accrue in the novel can be interpreted as metaphorical stages of transformation that aid the hero’s ‘escape to freedom.’ During the course of the novel, McCarthy pits various existentialisms, mainly of the religious and Sartrean kind, against each other as a way of highlighting the choices on offer for this besieged artist. The late-modernist Kuntstlerroman can only offer a fragmented transfiguration. Therefore, in the refusebeatnik figure of Cornelius Suttree we see a new Kunstler -figure emerging: an artist bricoleur piecing together a new mosaic out of a decaying and shattered social order.
참고문헌 (17)
- Cant, John, "Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism" (2007), Routledge
- Cooper, Linda R, "You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville", pp.190~197 (2012), LSUP
- Grammar, John M, "Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy" (2012), U of Mississippi P
- Giemza, Brian, "You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville", pp.158~173 (2012), LSUP
- Holloway, David, "The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy" (2002), Greenwood P
- Joyce, James, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1994), Dover
- Kristeva, Julia, "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection" (1982), Columbia UP
- Luce, Dianne C, "Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period" (2009), USCP
- Lukac, Georg, "The Theory of the Novel" (2006), Merlin P
- McCarthy, Cormac, "Suttree" (1989), Picador
- McCarthy, "Child of God" (1994), Picador
- Moretti, Franco, "The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture" (2000), Verso
- O’Gorman, Farrell, "You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville", pp.87~96 (2012), LSUP
- Polk, Noel, "You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville", pp.62~77 (2012), LSUP
- Prather, William, "Hall and Wallach. Vol. 1", pp.139~152
- Sullivan, Nell, "Stabat Mater Dolarosa: Abject Maternity in Suttree", The Suttree 25th Anniversary Celebration and Conference (2004)
- Watson, Jay, "You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville", pp.128~138 (2012), LSUP