In an MLA-style essay not exceeding 1500 words, discuss No Country for Old Men and True Grit as literary novels or genre novels. Decide how you would categorize each novel independently of the other. Give your reasons in both cases.
You should base you cases on such elements of narrative as character, plot, setting, theme, and point of view. Other factors, such as historical events or sociological trends might play roles as well.
Your essay should have at least five MLA-style in-text citations and five entries on its MLA-formatted works cited page.
Resources to use below—-
Is It Art, or Is It Entertainment? (How about Both?)
One of our considerations for this course is whether a distinction can (or should) be made between reading for our personal or societal edification and reading for entertainment. Many of us would not pick up a novel that had been assigned to us in English class just to read on our own time. Such novels are thought by many to be old fashioned and boring, and they don’t make sense unless we look up a lot of words or do research into the background and setting.
Such novels are “literature” or “literary fiction.” We read them because someone else (a teacher or parent) thinks we should. They are like broccoli when what we would rather consume is garlic fries with melted cheese.
A lot of Western novels (and other media) have been written to excite and entertain us with familiar characters and plots that do not challenge our cognitive abilities or expectations. These novels are often classified as Western (genre).
As we tried to show earlier in the course, these seemingly naive and less-than-accurate depictions of life on a cattle drive or on the frontier can be interpreted as playing an important part in the myth making that underlies some prominent aspects of the American experience. Narratives do not have to be great art in order to have great influence on a nation’s history or culture.
Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virgianian, and Zane Grey’s 1912 The Riders of the Purple Sage are rarely, if ever, significant parts of college literature courses even though they have been read by millions all over the world and inspired hundreds of films and TV series that have been viewed by hundreds of millions.
But, since critical reading and analysis of literary artifacts are among the skills fostered and practiced in higher education, we will take our study of True Grit and No Country for Old Men from the sociology of myth making to the literary study of genre identification and endeavor to determine if their impact and interest are mostly literary, cultural, as entertainment, or all of these things to some degree.
Here are some resources that I hope will advance our efforts to categorize the two novels we have been considering in this class and understand their meaning and importance (or lack thereof) as we learn and apply a literary taxonomy to them.
- Here is an introduction to the debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtrWe1YaJNk&t=3s (Links to an external site.)
- Here is another look at the same issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1sU4ImM3xs&t=1s (Links to an external site.)
- Here is a theatrical (and somewhat offensive) presentation of a case for the seriousness of No Country…: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HecxXlx1NG4&t=41s (Links to an external site.)
- More from the same people (Whatever we may think of this tone, these people do a pretty good philosophical analysis.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQEAZlNQbxY&t=17s (Links to an external site.)
- The Coen Brothers present the novel’s epilogue in their film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXNfxK5Q2Qg (Links to an external site.)
- True Grit as feminist philosophy (Remember that while the film is not the novel, it would not exist if the novel did not exist.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbiP3wxImAY (Links to an external site.)
- An array of talking heads on the art of Charles Portis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRB3qSC4TcA&t=1076s
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