Counternarrative Possibilities

Book excerpt: "Counternarrative Possibilities" reads Cormac McCarthy s Westerns against the backdrop of the two formative national tropes of virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after 9/11) in American mythology. While both of these figures have been used in exceptionalist discourse about the United States, they are also intimately connected with the emergence and transformation of the field of American Studies. Using an integrative approach to read McCarthy s Westerns in relation to both their ideological context and the institutionalized ideology critique that has shaped their reception, the book shows how McCarthy s Westerns simultaneously counter the national narratives underlying the tropes of virgin land and homeland and reinvest them with new, potentially transformative meaning. McCarthy s work of the 1980s and 1990s both draws on postmodern strategies of narrative disruption and departs from them by staging a return to narrative that prefigures recent postpostmodern developments. Departing from prevailing accounts of McCarthy that place him in relation to his literary antecedents, "Counternarrative Possibilities" takes a forward-looking approach that reads McCarthy s work as a key influence on millennial fiction. Weaving together disciplinary history with longstanding debates over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, "Counternarrative Possibilities" is at once an exploration of the limits of ideology critique in the 21st century and a timely reconsideration of McCarthy s work after postmodernism. "