EVOLUTE99's Common Place

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs history by showing the reader the reciprocal effect history and literature has on each other. Greenblatt re-imagines a time when human civilization was emerging from the darkness by reaching back to the past and uncovering the creation of the Renaissance and the Humanist’s movement. What Greenblatt initially reveals is the beginning of the Early Modern Period through ancient text. This book strikes a chord for book lovers, scholars; classicist, early modernist, and even modern scholars. It conjures up a late medieval romance of digging through monasteries and hidden chambers of West’s past. This book works as a retelling of an archeological process illuminating a story that has shaped the way our modern minds think. The struggle of a secular society versus a religious society. It explores atheism, Christianity, Paganism. Blending per-Christian ideas with a dominating Roman Catholic i...

 I n Walter Sullivan’s 1965 review of Cormac McCarthy’s first novel The Orchard Keeper, Sullivan claims McCarthy’s novel takes shape in “the middle of the agrarian influence” (721). This quote sends up a flare within the McCarthy community of scholars, who continue to debate Sullivan’s claims. Sullivan also acknowledges that McCarthy can be read as an author who has “had enough sense to see in the land a source of human salvation. [McCarthy] is a kind of anachronism who celebrates the traditional values in the traditional way” (721). However, many recent scholars disagree with Sullivan’s claims about the “land as a source of human salvation.” In her book Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period, Dianne Luce states that, “[i]t is a mistake either to confuse East Tennessee with the plantation South or to label McCarthy a latter-day Agrarian” (271). In making this comment, she also argues that The Orchard Keeper can be read “in the context of the classic Southern A...

Since I plan on spending the better part of this summer and semester researching and writing about this classic piece of American literature. I figured I could document my progress and for those interested in seeing a developing thesis process. Here ya go.  To begin things I will include an interview of myself by myself conducted on the 10th of June 2012. RP: Why did you choose Blood Meridian as the main focus for you Senior Thesis? RP: Hm. good question. Well, I have always been fascinated with the human species's ability to commit acts of violence when we are constantly conditioned to be good humans. However, to make it even more interesting lets include American humans--or better yet American humans in the 19th century. A lot of what is American today is based out of the 19th century and most philosophical American ideas stem from the American Romantic period and definitions of what it means to be American are defined as well by the likes of Walt Whitman, Henry ...