Cowboys in Hyperspace: A Marxist-Postcolonial Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy

My task in this analysis of McCarthy‟s Border Trilogy is to explore, in the fundamental materialist tradition, the dynamics of the base–superstructure exchange: In what way does the Trilogy follow the “cultural logic” of neoliberal capitalism (to quote Frederic Jameson‟s seminal thesis on postmodernism)? How do postmodern conceptions of time and space, in other words, infiltrate the narrative, and what are the effects of that infiltration upon the characters‟––or, indeed, upon the readers‟––perceptions of the events that take place in the story? In answering these questions, I begin in Chapter 1 by considering the Trilogy’s position within the larger Western genre, exploring the ways in which McCarthy aligns, departs, or rewrites the conventions of the mythic American West, particularly with respect to a conception of (American) history. I then move on to an intensive consideration of postmodern spatial representations in Chapter 2. Finally, in Chapter 3, I explore the function of myth in the Trilogy, and the effect it has upon the characters‟ motivations.No embargoAcademic Major: Englis