This is the experience of Edgar Allen Poe’s gallant knight in “Eldorado” who sojourns his life away “in search of Eldorado,” a place that lurks only in the shadows. Writers from Milton to Conrad have used Eldorado as a literary metaphor for an unattainable place of fulfillment, always just beyond reach. In America, the concept of Eldorado was applied to the California Gold Rush as countless Americans journeyed Westward to find their fortunes. Eldorado promised wealth and adventure to anyone willing to set out in pursuit of this legendary city. Eldorado was the fabled city of gold that explorers of the New World endeavored in vain to discover in the 16th Century. When Rawlins asks about the next town, as the two of them are heading down a darkened highway, Cole confesses that he would “make it Eldorado” (32).
As soon as Cole and Rawlins depart on their adventure, it becomes apparent they are chasing their dreams. On the surface level, dreams provide continuity between the major plot elements of the novel. This ending is where Cole’s dreams begin. He recognizes that he has reached the conclusion of something and that he is “already gone” (27). As he watches the warriors “ride on in that darkness they’d become…south across the plains to Mexico” (6), his soul longs for freedom, renewal and escape. Accordingly, Cole has come to the end of his way of life in America, as well as the end of his family line. At least in some of the short stories of Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter, the “end of something” subtly signals transition and not simply termination. An experienced reader of American literature will recognize that coming to the “end of something” often symbolizes coming simultaneously to the “beginning” of a profoundly new experience. After his grandfather’s funeral, Cole senses he has “come to the end of something” (5). In this construct, dreams provide the textual seams that bind McCarthy’s narrative together.Ĭole’s journey begins with a somber ending. The entire narrative functions chiastically in a “there and back” structure. Selected Essays on Poetry from The Georgia Review, 1988–2014 was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2015.In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy weaves his novel about John Grady Cole’s journey into Mexico and within himself together through a distinct structural framework. After teaching for many years at SUNY-Brockport-not all that far from her birthplace of Painted Post, NY-Judith retired and moved with her husband Stan Sanvel Rubin to Port Townsend, WA, from which they founded and co-directed for a decade the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. The collection What Persists Kitchen also founded State Street Press in the early 1980s, bringing out over the next twenty years seventy-six poetry chapbooks, two pamphlets, five full-length poetry volumes, two collections of translations, and a poetry anthology-the State Street Reader. Norton: In Short (1996), In Brief (1999), and Short Takes (2005)-the first two coedited by Mary Paumier Jones. She also conceived and edited three important collections of brief nonfiction pieces, all published by W. In 1998 Kitchen published a critical study, Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford (University of Oregon Press), and in 2002 a novel, The House on Eccles Road (Graywolf Press). Her four essay volumes are Only the Dance: Essays on Time and Memory (University of South Carolina Press, 1994) Distance and Direction (Graywolf Press, 2002) Half in Shade: Family, Photographs, and Fate (Coffee House Press, 2012) and The Circus Train (Ovenbird Books, 2013)-which appeared first, almost in its entirety, in the Summer 2013 issue of The Georgia Review. She then shifted to prose writing of several sorts, with emphases on essays and reviews. Her most recent book, The Circus Train, was the lead publication in a new venture-Ovenbird Books, at .” To that we respectfully add this brief overview of her writing and teaching career: Kitchen began as a poet, publishing the volume Perennials as the winner of the 1985 Anhinga Press Poetry Prize. The contributor’s note she supplied read as follows: “Judith Kitchen has three new forthcoming essays-in the Harvard Review, Great River Review, and River Teeth. Judith Kitchen passed away on 6 November 2014, just days after completing work on the essay-review in Spring 2015 Georgia Review.
0 kommentar(er)
