The Crossing

POSTMODERNISM

The Crossing

Postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies, and various tenets of Enlightenment rationality, including the existence of objective reality and absolute truth, as well as notions of rationality, human nature, and progress. It asserts that knowledge and truth are the product of unique systems of social, historical, and political discourse and interpretation, and are therefore contextual and constructed. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, self-referentiality, and irony.

An instrumental part of postmodernist literature is the tendency to push modernist thought to the extremes.

Postmodernism, the Novel &

the American West

Po-Mo Examples

Literature

• Infinite Jest, Wallace
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson
• American Psycho, Ellis
• Catch-22, Heller
• Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon

Film

• Taxi Driver (1976)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• Eternal Sunshine (2004)
• Inception (2010)
• Her (2013)

THE NOVEL

Genre

The American West

• Innovation
• Length
• Content
• Character & Plot Development
• Publication

The western has always provided a rich mine for stories of adventure, and indeed a huge number of purely commercial works have capitalized on the basic appeal of frontier adventurers. But the western has also furnished the material for a higher form of artistic vehicle, particularly in film. The historical western setting lacked the subtly confining web of social conventions. The West’s tenuous hold on the rule of law and its fluid social fabric necessitated the settling of individual and group conflicts by the use of violence and the exercise of physical courage, and the moral dramas and dilemmas arising within this elemental, even primeval, framework lent themselves remarkably well to motion-picture treatment.

Work

The Crossing (1994)

The story is the second in the Border Trilogy. It is noted for being a more melancholic novel than the first of the trilogy, without returning to the hellish bleakness of McCarthy's early novels.

Most of the protagonists are people of few words; thus the dialogues are few and concise; many parts of dialogues are written in untranslated Spanish.

The novel's realistic portrayal of an often destitute hero taking part in a series of loosely connected quests in a brutal, corrupt world lends this book many of the qualities of a picaro.

THE AUTHOR

CORMAC MCCARTHY

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933 and spent most of his childhood near Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1976 he moved to El Paso, Texas. McCarthy's fiction parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West--the first four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three in the Southwest and Mexico. The Orchard Keeper (1965) won the Faulkner Award for a first novel; it was followed by Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), and All the Pretty Horses, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for fiction in 1992.