Although the fact often goes unacknowledged, it is a truth that sometimes an author’s residence within and endurance in the canon is a result of how that author is perceived and taught in the academy. Most literary scholars are also professors and teachers. For this episode of Reading McCarthy I round up some of the usual suspects for a panel discussion upon teaching the works of McCarthy to students. The guests include Stacey Peebles, Chair of the English program, Director of Film Studies, and the Marlene and David Grissom Professor of Humanities at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. She is the author of Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq and Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen. She is editor of the collection Violence in Literature and, with Ben West, co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy. She has been editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal since 2010. She is the President of the Cormac McCarthy Society.

Dr. Bill Hardwig is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. He is author of Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900 ( UVA Press 2013). He has edited critical editions of In the Tennessee Mountains by Mary Murfree and a forthcoming edition of Evelyn Scott’s Background in Tennessee and is co-editor with Susanna Ashton of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt in the MLA teaching series. He is currently working on a study of McCarthy’s fiction tentatively titled How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style.

Bryan Giemza is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. Dr. Giemza is author or editor of numerous books on American literary and cultural history, 10 book chapters, and more than 30 published articles and reviews, including Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South, which received the South Atlantic Modern Language Association's Studies Award and features a chapter on McCarthy, as well as Images of Depression-Era Louisiana: The FSA Photographs of Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott ). His most recent books are Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy’s Expanding Worlds (2023), and Across the Canyons: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Divisive Communications in West Texas and Beyond, Texas Tech UP (2024).

As always, listeners should beware: there be spoilers here. Thanks to Thomas Frye, who composed, performed, and produced the music for READING MCCARTHY. The views of the host and his guests do not necessarily reflect the views of their home institutions or the Cormac McCarthy Society. If you enjoy this podcast you may also enjoy the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL PODCAST, hosted by myself and Kirk Curnutt.

To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.com. Despite the evening redness in the west Reading McCarthy is also still somewhat on X (Twitter). The website is at readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com, and if you’d like to support the show you can click on the little heart symbol at the top of the webpage to buy the show a cappuccino.

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Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast began accepting minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...

Episode 51: Teaching McCarthy Round Table

Reading McCarthy