Description

This class will discuss contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction in the United States, with a focus on Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, published in 2006. We will examine the representation of apocalypse and survival in relation to questions of ethics, ecology, community, father-son relationship, faith, trauma and the rewriting of the myth of the frontier. The category of post-apocalyptic fiction and its resonance in the present will also be explored.

We will also question the conventional meaning of the apocalypse understood as “the end of the world” to embrace its etymological meaning of “unveiling.” We will use Kenneth White’s discussion of “apocalypse” as “unveiling”: “Au-delà de ce qu’une apocalypse, normalement comprise, comporte d’hystérie collective, de millénarisme, d’eschatologie, de bouleversements dans le ciel accompagnés de révolutions terrestres sanglantes suivies de lendemains qui chanteront faux, j’entends « apocalypse » ici dans le sens premier, grec du terme : dévoilement, mise à nu. Déconditionnement, dérive, découverte.” (Kenneth White, Une Apocalypse tranquille, 9)

Additional excerpts of relevant literary and critical texts will be provided in class.

Compétences visées

The objectives of the class are:

• To familiarize the students with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic American fiction.
• To provide the critical apparatus needed for the analysis of the literary text under scrutiny.
• To introduce the students to one of the greatest American writers of the 20th and 21st century, who died in 2023, by studying one of his best-known novels.

To help the students develop coherent and articulated analyses and arguments.

Disciplines

• Études anglophones

Informations complémentaires

Sophie Mantrant : mantrant@unistra.fr

Bibliographie

Please use this edition:

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage International, 2006.

Secondary bibliography:

Frye, Steven (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Hay, John (ed.), Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Kenneth, White. Une Apocalypse tranquille: crise et création dans la culture occidentale, Grasset, 1985.

Payne, Mark, Flowers of Time. On Postapocalyptic Fiction, Princeton University Press, 2020.

Contacts

Responsable(s) de l'enseignement

• Sophie Mantrant