Modern American Literature Studies

This essay both reflects upon ecocriticism's investment in cultivating environmental consciousness at a distance from critical reflexivity and explores its theoretical discontents. Arguing for the necessity of bringing theory into praxis, the essay suggests that ecocriticism needs to cross the threshold between discur…

The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy, narrating the journey of two unnamed characters, a father and a son, through the devastated American landscape in the aftermath of a catastrophe, the nature of which remains unspecified throughout the narrative. Unlike science-fiction dystopias which present wor…

• AYLİN ALKAÇ

This essay argues that ecocriticism today has acclimatized transnational perspectives, and that transnationalization of ecocriticism explains its propensity to move beyond its insular focus on geographical and U.S.-based paradigms. In its transition from what Ursula Heise calls “ethics of proximity to a cosmopolitan e…

• SERPİL GÜLSÜM OPPERMANN

This paper looks at the perverted forms of appropriating, possessing, and hoarding foregrounded in Child of God and argues that McCarthy’s work raises questions about the modern bourgeois constructions of the subject founded upon property. Focusing on the relationship between the emergence of Lester Ballard’s necrophi…

This paper looks at the perverted forms of appropriating, possessing, and hoarding foregrounded in Child of God and argues that McCarthy’s work raises questions about the modern bourgeois constructions of the subject founded upon property. Focusing on the relationship between the emergence of Lester Ballard’s necrophi…

• FERMA LEKESİZALIN

This article analyzes Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985)—the first product of Cormac McCarthy’s borderlands immersion—by deploying the concept of “toxic masculinity,” an exaggerated masculinity related mythically to the role of the cowboy/warrior/pioneer, which creates recklessness and eventually…

• VAHİT YAŞAYAN

Caroline Gordon’s Ghosts: The Women on the Porch as Southern Gothic Literature Tanfer Emin Tunc (bio) Soon after its publication in 1944, Caroline Gordon’s The Women on the Porch—her sixth novel—generated two reviews in The New York Times. The first, by Orville Prescott, noted that the novel’s dust jacket depicted “th…

• TANFER EMIN TUNC

Louis A. Sass, borrowing from Shlovsky’s defamiliarization discusses certain patients, affected by specific mental disturbances, as “taking a very distant or else fragmentary microscopic view of an object, avoiding standard causal/narrative schemas of meaning and describing an object in terms of its mere existence or…

This chapter suggests the narrator&s;s exposure to a traumatic event provides Remainder with the narrative material necessary for the exploration of the vulnerability and monstrosity of a wounded character representative of our traumatic age. Since its publication in 2005, McCarthy&s;s Remainder has received considera…

As ecocriticism grows stronger through its intersections with the environmental sciences, environmental politics and philosophy, literary and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, globalization theories, and queer theory, reclaiming ecocriticism’s feminist lineage has become more and more urgent. In our attempt to “r…

Published in 2021, the novel The Island of Missing Trees by Turkish-British author Elif Shafak interlaces themes of love, loss, conflict, and struggle through alternating narrators both human and nonhuman, while switching geographically and temporally between Cyprus, both before and after the partition, and modern-day…

• ZEYNEP ZEREN ATAYURT FENGE

Within a material ecocritical framework, this article investigates the fatal consequences of toxicity on human beings, nonhuman entities, and the physical environment as reflected in Latife Tekin's Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills (1984) and John Burnside's Glister (2008). By emphasizing the agentic and nar…

• ADEM BALCI