원문정보
초록
영어
This article explores the political significance of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), particularly in terms of its association with 9/11 and the idea of Manifest Destiny. Although modified in various ways from its original form from the nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny, the concept has remained as the basis of twentieth-century American international politics until 9/11, when its validity as well as righteousness has been seriously challenged. The Road depicts a post-9/11 world, where various elements associated with Manifest Destiny have become undermined or even null. McCarthy represents the nation as a ruined and claustrophobic space, in which the boundary of ‘frontier’ disappears and thus the impulse to expand the frontier is either lost or turned inward. In this situation, all Americans in the novel turn from explorers to bums: as descendants of frontier spirit, they show a constant gesture of moving on the road, but this action is completely meaningless and without purpose. By analyzing these elements as a degraded version of Manifest Destiny, this article aims to go beyond the general sentiment about The Road as a psychological reaction of trauma and terror after 9/11, and tries to illuminate it as a political statement to revisit the nation’s old ideal.
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인용문헌
Abstract