Cormac McCarthy – a God-haunted writer of good and evil | prof. Steven Frye (CSU Bakersfield)

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.