Project MUSE®: The Cormac McCarthy Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Cormac McCarthy Journal.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 13 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: The Cormac McCarthy JournalTWOProject MUSE®The Cormac McCarthy Journal2333-30652333-3073Latest articles in The Cormac McCarthy Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor’s Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987662
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Plans are moving ahead for the next Cormac McCarthy Society conference, which will take place October 8–10, 2026, in Knoxville, Tennessee. It promises to be an exciting gathering, considering all of the new developments in the field. On October 27, 2025, a new cache of materials in the McCarthy Papers became available for study in the Wittliff Collections, more than doubling the size of McCarthy’s archive. Two biographies, by Tracy Daugherty and Laurence Gonzales, are currently in the process of publication. The University of Tennessee–Knoxville is working on accessioning the lion’s share of the books from McCarthy’s personal library, and conference attendees will hear more about their plans for that acquisition.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallEditor’s Introduction2026-04-07text/htmlen-USEditor’s Introduction2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®44312026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07McCarthy’s Magical Math: Toposes and Textual Interpretation in The Passenger and Stella Maris
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987663
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In no world is this truer than in the literary cosmos of Cormac McCarthy, and in no other contemporary novelist’s world do protagonists and antagonists so indelibly leave us with the impression that we have made the acquaintance of titans. No critical understanding of McCarthy’s fiction can precede the enterprise of unravelling (as opposed to “untangling,” a term which would misrepresent the mind-bending intricacy of McCarthy’s plotting) how these related but conceptually distinct perspectives dance pas de deux throughout his storytelling.Cormac McCarthy’s final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, offer up a fertile field full of opportunities for readers and critics alike. Heavily influenced by McCarthy’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallMcCarthy’s Magical Math: Toposes and Textual Interpretation in The Passenger and Stella Maris2026-04-07text/htmlen-USMcCarthy’s Magical Math: Toposes and Textual Interpretation in The Passenger and Stella Maris2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®862282026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Kekulé Essays: Cormac McCarthy’s Theory of Language, the Human, and the Ecological Promises of the Posthuman
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987664
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As many theorists have noted, the environmental humanities has increasingly moved beyond merely examining the explicitly “ecological” elements of a text or discourse and toward a mode of analysis focused on rethinking the limits of the ecological itself.1 Lawrence Buell usefully oversimplifies this transition as a move from first-wave ecocriticism, which studies the explicitly natural and ecological elements of texts to second-wave ecocriticism, which takes a much broader view of the ecological.2 For this second wave, the limiting of the ecological to those elements that appear inherently “natural” or “environmental” (animals, plants, landscapes, etc.) is itself a deeply ideological conceit: no aspect of human
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallThe Kekulé Essays: Cormac McCarthy’s Theory of Language, the Human, and the Ecological Promises of the Posthuman2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Kekulé Essays: Cormac McCarthy’s Theory of Language, the Human, and the Ecological Promises of the Posthuman2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®744242026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Uncanny Revelation in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987665
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Critics have long noted the centrality of dreams in McCarthy’s works. Edwin T. Arnold writes: “It may be that all of Cormac McCarthy’s writings constitute a prolonged dream,” resonant with “the brilliant clarity of the vision that momentarily repositions us through revelation” (38). Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung believed dreams gave access to the unconscious. Freud theorized that dreams held hidden desires and fears while Jung intuited a collective unconscious manifested in primordial images and archetypes. Jung’s concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious have long been upheld as valuable interpretive tools to McCarthy’s novels. The Road, with its quest narrative and working title of The Grail
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallUncanny Revelation in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road2026-04-07text/htmlen-USUncanny Revelation in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®993922026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07After Apocalyptic Closure, a New Beginning: The Poetics of Worldly Dis-Appearance in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Heideggerian Religious Allegory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987666
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This article seeks to reengage questions concerning Cormac McCarthy’s religious sensibilities in The Road following a suggestive comment made by the old man Ely about the boy in the narrative being nothing less than “the last god” (Road 183). Insomuch as McCarthy’s fictional vision seems to hone in on metaphysical questions surrounding the relationship between individual subjectivity, the language of the self, and the ultimate essence of reality as a measure of the limitations of these linguistic and cognitive constructs, the sense of the numinous is ambiguously opened up from within the ordinary, allowing the “possibility of the divine” (Frye 3) to become a sustained area of inquiry in a text saturated with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallAfter Apocalyptic Closure, a New Beginning: The Poetics of Worldly Dis-Appearance in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Heideggerian Religious Allegory2026-04-07text/htmlen-USAfter Apocalyptic Closure, a New Beginning: The Poetics of Worldly Dis-Appearance in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Heideggerian Religious Allegory2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®915742026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Learned Gentlemen with the Copies of Blackstone: Law and Power in Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987667
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Of the many influences on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, none was perhaps as important as Herman Melville’s masterful Moby-Dick (Tesar iii). “Given that McCarthy [called] Moby-Dick his favorite book,” numerous McCarthy scholars have attempted to “find reverberations of Melville in his [McCarthy’s] writing” (1).1 These scholars have found ample material. Tesar has observed that “[s]ome of Moby-Dick’s most memorable scenes and textual features appear in modified forms in Blood Meridian” (1). More generally, Tesar argues that “Melville provides McCarthy with the imaginative foundation for his [entire] novel” (5). Melville’s imaginative imprint on McCarthy extends to McCarthy’s characterization of the members of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallThe Learned Gentlemen with the Copies of Blackstone: Law and Power in Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Learned Gentlemen with the Copies of Blackstone: Law and Power in Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®335612026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07On Augusta Britt
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987668
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The emails started on November 20, 2024. First from Dianne Luce, because she’s a person who is always on top of everything. Then from other old friends in the Cormac McCarthy Society. Later that day, and over the next two weeks, I heard from possibly everyone I have ever known in any capacity. (That’s hyperbole, but only by a little.) My favorite was a grad school friend I hadn’t heard from in years who sent me a Facebook message with a link and one word: “Thoughts?”This was all to do with the Vanity Fair article by Vincenzo Barney about Augusta Britt, whom the article’s title called Cormac McCarthy’s “secret muse.” Barney, whom Britt had contacted on Substack, writes that Britt met McCarthy in Tucson in 1976, when
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallOn Augusta Britt2026-04-07text/htmlen-USOn Augusta Britt2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®383032026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Ford Boy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987669
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On October 9, 1959, the University of Tennessee newspaper, Orange and White, announced that the first issue of The Phoenix, a literary supplement to the newspaper, would be included in its October 16 issue. Due to printing difficulties, the publication was delayed a week. The issue featured the creative writing and art work by UT students and included “Wake for Susan” (McCarthy, 1959), the first published fiction by C. J. McCarthy Jr., later known as Cormac McCarthy.1 After a half-century the short story was reprinted in the fiftieth anniversary issue of the same student literary magazine in which it was first published (McCarthy, 2010), and most recently “Wake for Susan” was again reprinted as a stand-alone
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallThe Ford Boy2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Ford Boy2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®249272026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Cormac McCarthy’s Neoliberalism: A Breakdown in Mercantile Ethics ed. by Brian Schill (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987670
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Neoliberalism is a diffuse term. Its extended application to Cormac McCarthy’s corpus and its reception is an important and timely venture. Doing so requires nuance and an embrace of contradictions, which Brian James Schill’s collection handles admirably. The opposing ways neoliberalism as a concept may apply to McCarthy, as well as McCarthy’s own struggle to oppose its ambiguities of his own accord, are tackled early on. “The essays in this book,” Schill explains, “argue that to gloss over neoliberal political economy specifically while reading Cormac McCarthy is to opt out of a deeper material and epistemological understanding of the author’s decades-long intellectual project: its increasingly commodified
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallCormac McCarthy’s Neoliberalism: A Breakdown in Mercantile Ethics ed. by Brian Schill (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USCormac McCarthy’s Neoliberalism: A Breakdown in Mercantile Ethics ed. by Brian Schill (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®155462026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Cormac McCarthy’s Last Outlaws: The Counselor and The Passenger by Peter Josyph (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987671
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To scholars and fans of Cormac McCarthy’s work, Peter Josyph needs little introduction. His Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy (2010) has now become something of a classic—whether you agree with Josyph’s takes or not—in the field of McCarthy studies. Since then, he has penned several others, including Cormac McCarthy’s House: Reading McCarthy Without Walls (2013) and The Wrong Reader’s Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses (2020), developing an often-adversarial, anecdotal style based on personal, affective interpretations of McCarthy’s novels, plays, and screenplays, rather than an academic style of criticism. In his newest work, Cormac McCarthy’s Last Outlaws, late McCarthy is fixed in Josyph’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/658/image/coversmallCormac McCarthy’s Last Outlaws: The Counselor and The Passenger by Peter Josyph (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USCormac McCarthy’s Last Outlaws: The Counselor and The Passenger by Peter Josyph (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®187412026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07