What is it in Cormac McCarthy's prose that is so universal? What kind of answers about the condition of human life can we get from his novels? Why is there so much violence in his writing?

In this episode, Professor Steven Frye discusses one of the most significant American novelists of our time, his influences, the most important themes, and his philosophical battles with good, evil, and religion. The violence that McCarthy portrays, he says, is not excessive, because that was the reality of the American West. "The West was a space of violence, and it’s a characteristic of American history, and of the whole world for McCarthy," he adds.

Professor Steven Frye is Department Chair and Professor of English in the Department of English at California State University Bakersfield, where he teaches courses on American Romance Tradition and the literature of the American West.

In this conversation, we explore the ways that McCarthy tried to challenge American myths, we talk about the meaningfulness of the American Frontier, the typological landscape, Gnosticism, and McCarthy's ecoconsciousness.

Host: Maria Łusakowska, Wydział Neofilologii UW

Guest: prof. Steven Frye (California State University Bakersfield)

Mentioned in this episode:

T.S. Eliot's essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

T.S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 

Understanding Cormac McCarthy (2009) by Prof. Steven Frye

Albert Erskine, editor of William Faulkner

Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973) by Richard Slotkin

More on the concept of the American Frontier by Frederick Jackson Turner

Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1998) by Richard Slotkin

Sergio Leone (film director)

Sam Peckinpah (film director)

Larry McMurtry (writer)

The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (1988) by Vereen M. Bell

Edward Abbey (writer)

Dr. Nell Sullivan (gender in McCarthy's works)

Novels by Cormack McCarthy mentioned:

Suttree⁠ (1979),

Outer Dark (1968),

Blood Meridian (1985),

The "Border Trilogy":

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

The Crossing (1994)

Cities of the Plain (1998),

The Road (2006),

The Passenger (2022),

Stella Maris (2022)

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