The most intriguing aspect of Cormac McCarthy's writing is the irresistible premonition that his sentences carry an exceptional potential, that after each subsequent reading they surprise us with increasingly deeper layers of meaning, which are often in complete contradiction to the readers' initial intuitions. His novels belong to the kind that we dream about at night, that follow us and do not let themselves be forgotten. Cormac McCarthy's prose has been read in the light of a variety of theories, ranging from Marxist criticism, the pastoral tradition, Gnostic theology, the revisionist approach to the American Western, to feminist and eco-critical methodology. The perspective offered in The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical is an existentialist theological approach, which proposes a reading of McCarthy that focuses on the issue of evil and violence as it is dealt with in his novels. Evil, unquestionably being a metaphysical category and, as a result, quite commonly pronounced passe, is a challenging and overwhelming topic, which nevertheless deeply concerns all of us. Boguta-Marchel's book is therefore an attempt to confront a theme that is an unpopular object of scholarly examination and, at the same time, a commonly shared experience in the everyday life of all human beings. The problem of evil is. Evil is obviously a metaphysical category, and, therefore, quite. It tends to be not only relativized and viewed as utterly subjective, but also otherwise termed and defined solely through its specifically contextualized (i.e. practical) manifestations. This is the first and most fundamental impediment one stumbles upon when attempting to theorize about evil. And yet the experience of evil as something external, a reality existing outside and, to some extent, despite the individual, is quite commonplace and familiar. Such an experience is, obviously, by definition subjective, though in itself it does render evil's very existence as, in a sense, objective.
Author(s): Hanna Boguta-Marchel
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Year: 2012
Language: English
Pages: 211
City: Newcastle upon Tyne
