Blood Meridian: A GIS-Literary Analysis
Summary
This article presents a geographical information systems (GIS) analysis of Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian', integrating literary geography with Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotopes. By mapping latitude and longitude coordinates against concepts like the Road, the Threshold, and the US-Mexico border, the study reveals the novel as a 'cartographical novel'. It argues that the GIS/MAXQDA platform illuminates 'Blood Meridian' as a deep chronotopic map, tracing the protagonist's journey and serving as a spatial metaphor for the violent US westward expansion of the 19th century.
Key Insights
Novel shows emergence of an American Imperial chronotope.
The purpose of this mapping is to chart the emergence of an American Imperial chronotope within the novel.
GIS/MAXQDA platform frames Blood Meridian as a 'cartographical novel'.
Viewed through the lenses of a GIS/MAXQDA platform, Blood Meridian comes into focus as a 'cartographical novel', illuminating its literary geography as a melange spun from allusions to and spatial remediations of Classical, medieval, and Indigenous mythologies.
Sections
Abstract
GIS reading of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian provides a literary geography analysis.
This article offers a geographical information systems (GIS) reading of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), which functions as a literary geography analysis.
Analysis plots coordinates with Bakhtin's chronotopes and border politics.
It plots latitude and longitude coordinates in conjunction with Mikhail M. Bakhtin's chronotopes of the Road, the Rabelaisian, the Petty-Bourgeois Provincial Town, the Threshold, and the political cartography of the United States–Mexico border established by the 1849 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Novel shows emergence of an American Imperial chronotope.
The purpose of this mapping is to chart the emergence of an American Imperial chronotope within the novel.
Blood Meridian fictionalizes the historical Glanton Gang's mercenary actions.
Blood Meridian is presented as a fictionalized account of historical events carried out by the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries contracted by Governor Trias in 1849 to counter Apache raids in Chihuahua province, Mexico.
GIS/MAXQDA platform frames Blood Meridian as a 'cartographical novel'.
Viewed through the lenses of a GIS/MAXQDA platform, Blood Meridian comes into focus as a 'cartographical novel', illuminating its literary geography as a melange spun from allusions to and spatial remediations of Classical, medieval, and Indigenous mythologies.
Novel acts as a spatial metaphor for US westward expansion.
The GIS/MAXQDA platform frames Blood Meridian as a deep chronotopic map that, in tracing the spiralling lifepath of its protagonist, the 'Kid', across the terra damnata of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, creates an analogy and spatial metaphor for the violent geographical teleology of US nineteenth-century westward expansion which unfolded between the 1830s and 1880s.
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Blood Meridian: A GIS-Literary Analysis
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