Chapter 20 - Ecology

Summary

Throughout his career, Cormac McCarthy has produced a rich body of literature that examines the complicated and often fraught interactions between humans and the more-than-human world. Encompassing tales about precarity and abandonment, failures of the Western dream to provide new beginnings and new freedoms, philosophical meditations on the limits of human knowledge, and apocalyptic revisions of agency in end times, McCarthy’s writings examine complex entanglements between human and nonhuman characters in an ever-changing material world. His place-based writings reconfigure spatial categories as they unfold across diverse geographical scales that are local, regional, national, transnational, and at times even planetary. Drawing on new developments in materialist ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, this chapter explores how the author engages intersections between economy and ecology; addresses agency across humans, animals, and the more-than-human world; and examines challenges posed by the Anthropocene. Through its depictions of ecology and agriculture, the role of the written word in the conquest of the Americas, and the Great Acceleration resulting from the Cold War global arms race, McCarthy’s writings help readers assess some of the more baffling complexities of our new geologic age.