Northwestern Oklahoma State University’s Assistant Professor of English Dr. Richmond Adams answered an invitation to prepare articles that explore the nature of novels concerning the American South during the early years of the present century.
Published as a collection titled “The Twenty-First Century Southern Novel” through the literary journal “Mississippi Quarterly,” it will be in the format of a special edition within the journal.
Adams’ piece will explore how Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel “No Country for Old Men,” set in 1980, examines the changing nature of American exceptionalism, most particularly how it became manifest during what all critics have understood as the novel’s principal moral crisis of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s unanticipated retirement with the mass murderer Anton Chiguhr still at large from law enforcement’s custody.
Adams said that the historical work of C. Vann Woodward argues that by being defeated in the Civil War, the American South, unlike the rest of its national siblings, came to understand that any such crisis inevitably contains more ambiguity and guilt, rather than absolutism or clarity, as its core.
“That sense of traditionally ‘un-American’ difference,” said Adams as he employs Woodward’s reasoning, “actually reflects how the rest of the world had long before simply accepted such moral complexities, and through them, an appreciation of limits, uncertainty and incompleteness in the midst of any human endeavor.”
For more information contact Adams at (580) 327-8428 or rbadams@nwosu.edu.