Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

by Julian Murphet (Editor), Mark Steven (Editor)

Styles of Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature. There are two dominant modes of analysis gathered the first, performed by Julian Murphet, Paul Sheehan, and Mark Steven, is to locate the novel within its political, spiritual, and economic climates; the second, whose exponents include Paul Patton, Sean Pryor, Chris Danta, and Grace Hellyer, deals with the formal dimensions of McCarthy's characteristically brilliant prose in relation to its sparse narrative. By coupling historically sensitive analysis with incisive formal criticism, the contributors not only account for the matchless form of this exemplary novel; they also suggest that The Road has something unique to disclose about the world we inhabit.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 2012

About the author

Julian Murphet is a Marxist literary scholar specialising in North American literary history and with interests in film studies, literary theory, and the uses and abuses of 'race'. He has written books on modern character, prison writing, William Faulkner, modernism, the literature of Los Angeles, Bret Easton Ellis, and the filmmaker Todd Solondz; and edited several scholarly collections on various topics.

Reviews

[Nicholas Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Styles of Extinction is an essential read of literary theory that plumbs into the needfulness of apocalyptic literature in the 21st century--something The Road really helped inaugurate. You won't be getting much close reading--this is about the book's ideas in relation to theory and philosophy. Benjamin and Jameson get quoted a lot (too much), but there's a very good look into Derrida on the apocalypse and literature in particular. The collection is very well researched and will point readers to more resources on post-apocalyptic thought.

Murphet's essay was the most thrilling. It strikes at the heart of things: animal, apocalypse of naming, McCarthy's conservatism, utopia/placelessness, liberation or not from the sacred.

Also excellent was Steven's essay that takes the book as post-Capitalist and contrasts 'stated' cannibal mobs/slavers versus the 'stateless' wandering refugees of the book. The Road points to a simple human life starting the day after the world ends.

Sheehan pins things to contemporary politics too with 9/11 and suicide bombers, investigating what 'the worst' is for both society and McCarthy. The essay gets into Beckett, and it touches briefly on Lacan's ethics, suggesting that Hegel's master/slave is of more use here.

Hellyer looks into the philosophical layers of the mother's suicide.

Patton and the Afterword focus on the ethics at work in the Road--a nice way to end the book. Patton contrasts Kantian austerity/sublime with Nietzsche. It tempers the mind nicely, though it does just leave the boy as an unthinkable ubermench (I think there's more to be done both in terms of ethics and Nietzsche here. Even if there's a foreclosing of thought, we can still do something with it.) Zournazi's afterward puts the ongoing life of kindness to refreshing light.

The essay on greyness was more like a close reading, and the one on meter offered a neat way to reconsider the text.

Contra what the other reviewer said, there's a lot on religion and the sacred throughout these essays. American Christian fundamentalism gets brought into play, and there's a nice contrasting between the ethics/religion of the man vs the boy as well, all in light of the atheism of living in a symbolically destitute world. Really, a lot of the novel's points are refrains through each essay. How many times do I need spotted fish quoted at me? But like I said, a lot's at work here, and the essays stretch into the actual huge significance of the Road. Very exciting.

[R. Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very helpful in some areas, but I was hoping it would help me make heads or tails out of the heavy Christian imagery in The Road. Unfortunately, these authors (curiously) shied away from that topic. It's still helpful.