Open Yale Courses

ENGL 291: The American Novel Since 1945

Lecture 17 - Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian << previous session | next session >>

Overview:

In this first of two lectures on Blood Meridian, Professor Hungerford walks us through some of the novel's major sources and influences, showing how McCarthy engages both literary tradition and American history, and indeed questions of origins and originality itself. The Bible, Moby-Dick, Paradise Lost, the poetry of William Wordsworth, and the historical narrative of Sam Chamberlain all contribute to the style and themes of this work that remains, in its own right, a provocative meditation on history, one that explores the very limits of narrative and human potential.

Reading assignment:

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)

Class lecture:

Transcript
html
Audio
mp3
Video
medium bandwidth
low bandwidth
high bandwidth

Yale University 2008.  Some rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated on this page or on the Open Yale Courses website, all content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0)