Literature and Landscape: Steinbeck's Settlers and McCarthy's Wanderers | Livestream Zoom (Closed)

Course Description:

In their novels about the West, both John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy draw on landscapes to shape meaning and characters’ identities. In one of Steinbeck’s first California novels, "The Pastures of Heaven" (1932), characters in each interconnected short story settle in the West—or try to—and create gardens and farms. Their vision is a pastoral ideal—one that Steinbeck both embraces and deconstructs. Cormac McCarthy’s Southwestern border novels consider different tropes of the West—restlessness, new beginnings, crossing borders. The landscape of Texas and Mexico are stark, raw, often menacing in one of his most popular novels, "All the Pretty Horses" (1992). We'll look to the far horizon as we read and discuss both works in this exploration of literature and landscape.