Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy's Border Fiction

Cormac McCarthy's novels are usually seen as belonging to one of two longstanding regionalist literary traditions, Southern Gothic or the Western. This essay considers McCarthy's border fiction instead as part of an emergent borderlands discourse that is at once bilingual, multicultural, and revisionist. Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses represent key moments in the history of the Southwest region in which they are set; both novels in effect remember the dis(re)membered bodies lost in the violent struggle over territory. McCarthy's border fiction challenges provincial models of US literary history and ought to be reconsidered within postnationalist American studies.