Editor’s Introduction

Plans are now well underway for our next Cormac McCarthy conference, which will take place September 1–3, 2017, in Austin, Texas, with presentations beginning on Friday morning and ending mid-day on Sunday. Our sessions will take place at the downtown Hilton, located at 500 E. 4th St., right in the midst of some of Austin’s best restaurants and coffee shops—not to mention other landmarks like the Alamo Drafthouse theater, the Mexic-Arte Museum, the Elephant Room jazz club, Iron Works BBQ, and Voodoo Doughnut. The Hilton conference rate for single and double rooms (which is available from August 31 through September 3) is $189 a night. When you’re ready to reserve a room, you can call the Hilton at 512-482-8000 and give the group code “CMC,” or you can go to this website: https://aws.passkey.com/event/16228617/owner/11913/landing

We’ll post more information as we have it on cormacmccarthy.com, so stay tuned!

This Spring 2017 issue of The Cormac McCarthy Journal includes new work on the two texts most popular with scholars—Blood Meridian and The Road. Given that popularity, critical approaches that are original and fresh are particularly exciting. Here, Robert Kottage offers a detailed and fascinating look at the Tarot cards featured in Blood Meridian, expanding on the initial information offered by John Sepich. John Mark Robison follows that with a consideration of currency in that novel, a much-discussed topic in McCarthy studies generally that Robison takes in a new direction. Marie-Reine Pugh and David Huebert then each address the workings of memory and loss in The Road, which Pugh couples with a reading of No Country for Old Men. Both Pugh and Huebert identify a kind of visionary potential in McCarthy’s representation of characters’ remembrance, a looking forward that is paradoxically only possible by looking back—leading, in Huebert’s reading, to an ecological awareness that he calls “elegiac protomourning.”

Also in this issue Lucas Thompson contributes a Note with a technique for teaching McCarthy, particularly his elaborate sentence structure, and Russell Hillier reviews Petra Mundik’s recent monograph A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy.

Enjoy, and keep in touch!