Einherjar86
Active Member
Frankenstein is fantastic. I'm reading it in a Gothic seminar I'm taking this semester.
Not sure about McCarthy. I'm personally of the opinion that Blood Meridian should be mandatory reading for 20th-century American Lit courses, but lots of people would probably disagree with me. You may actually enjoy Blood Meridian somewhat; I situate it in a tradition that begins with Homer, continues through Dante, finds its manifestation in prose with the novels of Herman Melville, and most recently manifests in his novels. He's one of the most well-read and knowledgeable fiction writers still working today, and I think he'll be considered an "American Classic" before the end of the next century.
Blood Meridian is essentially a scathing rebuttal of American exceptionalism and of traditional Enlightenment thought. Nothing is left untouched in that novel. And he uses punctuation, he just doesn't use quotation marks, which isn't anything new, and occasionally omits apostrophes and, of course, writes in dialect. His sentences all end in periods though, although he has some ridiculously long sentences; like the scene where the Judge teaches everyone how to make gunpowder with their own piss:
"We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughin the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil's batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself I dont suppose and he pulls out his knife and he commences to trowel it across the southfacin rocks, spreadin it out thin with the knifeblade and watchin the sun with one eye and him smeared with blacking and reekin of piss and sulphur and grinnin and wieldin the knife with a dexterity that was wondrous like he did it every day of his life."
Behold, the syntactical prowess of Cormac McCarthy.
Not sure about McCarthy. I'm personally of the opinion that Blood Meridian should be mandatory reading for 20th-century American Lit courses, but lots of people would probably disagree with me. You may actually enjoy Blood Meridian somewhat; I situate it in a tradition that begins with Homer, continues through Dante, finds its manifestation in prose with the novels of Herman Melville, and most recently manifests in his novels. He's one of the most well-read and knowledgeable fiction writers still working today, and I think he'll be considered an "American Classic" before the end of the next century.
Blood Meridian is essentially a scathing rebuttal of American exceptionalism and of traditional Enlightenment thought. Nothing is left untouched in that novel. And he uses punctuation, he just doesn't use quotation marks, which isn't anything new, and occasionally omits apostrophes and, of course, writes in dialect. His sentences all end in periods though, although he has some ridiculously long sentences; like the scene where the Judge teaches everyone how to make gunpowder with their own piss:
"We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughin the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil's batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself I dont suppose and he pulls out his knife and he commences to trowel it across the southfacin rocks, spreadin it out thin with the knifeblade and watchin the sun with one eye and him smeared with blacking and reekin of piss and sulphur and grinnin and wieldin the knife with a dexterity that was wondrous like he did it every day of his life."
Behold, the syntactical prowess of Cormac McCarthy.
