McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Undergraduate / Graduate

Cormac McCarthy's 1985 masterpiece Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West has been described as 'the ultimate Western' and the greatest American novel of the twentieth century. Yet it is also a book that is infamous for its baroque prose style as well as its nightmarish depictions of violence and bloodshed. Our primary task in this course is to read Blood Meridian in its entirety. We will explore the novel's themes, including (but not limited to): war and the problem of evil; history and myth; violence and the sacred; violence and the carnivalesque; empire and conquest. But our reading will not be limited to Blood Meridian alone. We will read parts of some of McCarthy's other works, some of the books that McCarthy read in preparation for writing the novel, and some of the scholarship on