Download the Schedule [PDF]

Berea College
Berea, Kentucky
March 6-9, 2013

Wednesday, March 6

2:30-4 p.m. Session I: John Grady Cole, Hisself
The Skylight Room, Historic Boone Tavern

• The Character of John Grady Cole.
  Rob McInroy, Nottingham University.
• Cowboy Character in All the Pretty Horses.
  Phillip A. Snyder, Brigham Young University.
• John Grady Cole, the American Moses: All the Pretty Horses and the Exodus Mythos.
  Thomas R. Cody, Providence College.
• No Country for Young Men: Intertextual Connections between All the Pretty Horses and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
  Leslie Harper Worthington, Gadsden State Community College.

4:15-5:45 p.m. Session II: Blood Meridian
The Skylight Room, Historic Boone Tavern

• Cormac McCarthy’s Citizen-Soldiers from Blood Meridian to No Country for Old Men.
  Ty Hawkins, Walsh University.
• The Judge’s Molar: Infanticide and the Meteorite in Blood Meridian.
  Russell Hillier, Providence College.
• A Clamoring for Representation: Trauma and Language in Blood Meridian.
  Matthew Hagan, Oregon State University, Corvallis.
• Blood Meridian and the Old West Fossil Feuds.
  David McKay Powell, Eastern Kentucky University.

7 p.m. Reception and Welcome
Coyle Gathering Room, Historic Boone Tavern

8:15 p.m. Keynote: Peter Josyph, “How Cormac McCarthy Saved Civilization”
Coyle Gathering Room, Historic Boone Tavern

Thursday, March 7

All Thursday Sessions will be held in the Baird Lounge on the second floor of the Alumni Building on Campus.

8:30-10 a.m. Session III: Mexico in The Border Trilogy I (“This is another country.”)

• “…no greater monster than reason”: Mexico and Spain in All the Pretty Horses.
  Allen Josephs, University of West Florida.
• “Some monument to a lost expedition”: Out Beyond the Borders in The Crossing.
  Brad McDuffie, Nyack College.
• Doomed Enterprises in Caborca: Billy Parham, the Ex-Mormon, and the Crabb Expedition of 1857.
  Dianne C. Luce, Independent Scholar.
• Mexico, Catholicism, and Conversion in Cities of the Plain.
  Bryan Giemza, Randolph Macon College.

10:15-11:45 a.m. Session IV: The Appalachian Works I

• “Ballard among gothic treeboles”: Genre, Voyeurism, and the Search for Morality in Child of God.
  M. Allie Blair, University of Mississippi.
• New Southern Gothic: Zombies of the “Once Grand House.”
  Jay Ellis, University of Colorado.
• The Limits of Culture: Sympathetic Revulsion in Child of God.
  Bill Phillips, University of Mississippi.
• “It’s All In Your Mind”: Culla Holme, Appalachia, and Outer Dark’s Grim Triune.
  Gabe Rikard, SUNY Loch Sheldrake.

Noon-1 p.m. Lunch

1-2:30 p.m. Session V: All the Pretty Horses I (Themes)

• “Take care with whom you break bread”: The Sacramental Meal in All the Pretty Horses.
  Julie Ooms, Baylor University.
• “A Relationship of Diverging Equity”: Searching for Justice in Cormac McCarthy’s Borderlands.
  Susan Tyburski, University of Denver.
• The homo sacer and the sovereign in All the Pretty Horses.
  Nadine Fessler, M.A., Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
• Inside “La Periquera”: Prisons and Power in All the Pretty Horses.
  Lydia Cooper, Creighton University.

2:45-4:15 p.m. Session VI: Teaching Cormac McCarthy

• Ridden Off Wet and into Chilling Sunsets: Using the Film and Novel Versions of All the Pretty Horses Together To Teach Evaluating Adaptations.
  David Cremean, Black Hills State University.
• Teaching The Road in the General Education Classroom.
  Benjamin S. West, SUNY at Delhi.
• How Not to Write like Cormac McCarthy.
  Stephen Pastore, Independent Scholar, Senior Editor, Grand Oaks Books Publishing.

4:30-6 p.m. Session VII: Fun and Miscellaneous Stuff I

• Notes from Knoxville: Some Allusions to Country Music in Suttree.
  Wesley Morgan, University of Tennessee Knoxville.
• Grandad’s Old Thumb-Buster: Weaponry as Cultural Iconography in All the Pretty Horses.
  Scott Yarbrough, Charleston Southern University.
• Transcending the “F” Word: The Literary Heritage of the Frontier in The Border Trilogy.
  Carole Juge, University of Paris.

6-8 p.m. Opening Reception: All the Pretty Horses: A Tribute. By Peter Josyph.
Works on Paper Celebrating Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.
Loyal Jones Appalachian Center, Berea College

Dinner at Liberty

Friday, March 8

All Friday Sessions will be held in the Baird Lounge on the second floor of the Alumni Building on Campus.

8:30-10 a.m. Session VIII: Mexico in The Border Trilogy II

• “Mexico Is Not Europe”: Cormac McCarthy’s Mexican History in All the Pretty Horses.
  Manuel Broncano, Texas A&M International University.
• The Role of Mexico in All the Pretty Horses: Then and Now.
  Alia Haddad, New York University School of Film Studies.
• Mojado Reverso—or, a Reverse Wetback: On John Grady Cole’s Concealed Identity in All the Pretty Horses.
  Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, University of Puerto Rico.
• Out Where the West Begins: Landscape in All the Pretty Horses.
  Allen Berry, University of Southern Mississippi.

10-15-11:45 a.m. Session IX: All the Pretty Horses II (Stylistics and Rhetoric)

• “Did you give your word?”: The Ardenthearted Speech Acts of All the Pretty Horses.
  Christopher White, Governors State University.
• Levels of Narrative Intrusion in the Dialogue in All the Pretty (Little) Horses: A Stylistic Analysis.
  Delys Snyder, Brigham Young University.
• Border and Horizon.
  Evan Edwards, DePaul University.
• Cryptonomy and All the Pretty Horses.
  Stephen Tatum, University of Utah.

Noon-1 p.m. Lunch

1-2:30 p.m. Session X: The Appalachian Works II

• Plenary Lecture: Order and Chaos: Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Cormac McCarthy and the Cumberland Gap.
  H. R. Stoneback, SUNY New Paltz.
• Tearing a Home in the Outer Dark: Allusions in the Names Culla and Rinthy Holme.
  Woods Nash, University of Tennessee.
• Parallax in Suttree and Ulysses.
  Lou Jillette, University of Western Sydney.
• Tracks in the Ashes: An Intertextual Analysis of the End of The Road.
  Matt Dodson, Oregon State University.

2:45-4:15 p.m. Session XI: All the Pretty Horses III (More Themes)

• Spectral Mourning: The Geography of Absence in All the Pretty Horses.
  Cynthia Ostrom, University of South Dakota.
• All the Pretty Horses: Stuck in the Dream of a Boundless Desert.
  Irene Nasi, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
• “And they rode on”: Figures and Gestures of Removal in All the Pretty Horses.
  Aaron Cloyd, University of Kentucky.
• “The horses share a common soul”: Myth, Identity, and Deep Ecology in John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.
  Jeff Yeager, West Virginia University.

4:30-6 p.m. Session XII: Fun and Miscellaneous Stuff II

• A Photographic Record of the Places in All the Pretty Horses.
  Gene Young, Sam Houston State University.
• End-zones: Why John Grady Cole Would Have Made One Hell of a Quarterback.
  Molly McBride Lasco, Lone Star College

7 p.m-whenever: 20th Anniversary Dinner and Celebration
Windswept Lodge

Saturday, March 9

9-10:30 a.m. Session XIV: Valedictory and Breakfast
Skylight Room, Historic Boone Tavern

• The Sunset Limited and The Screwtape Letters.
  Marty Priola, Webmaster, The Cormac McCarthy Society.
• All the Pretty (Picture Book) Horses: McCarthy as Verbal Illustrator.
  Randall Wilhelm, Clemson University.
• Picturebook Horses: The Problem of Cultural Capital in All the Pretty Horses.
  Nell Sullivan, University of Houston-Downtown.
• The Promise of Oblivion: Clambering Through the Ruins of Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction.
  Peter Weber, Independent Scholar.

Revised 17 Feb 2013