| Title | Steps in Time |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Derrida’s Impossible Hospitality and the Apocalyptic Future of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road |
| Contributor | Carol Dougherty (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.53288/0446.1.11 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-before-and-the-after-critical-asynchrony-now/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Carol Dougherty |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2025-01-29 |
| Long abstract | This paper argues that the aporia at the heart of Derrida’s essay on hospitality — its absence, its transgressions, its digressions – perfectly describes the narrative landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road. Following Derrida along McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic road allows the reader to explore the impossible hospitality of a world in which a man and his son must travel without the comforts of home or the safety of houses. It also suggests the opposite – revealing the experience of homelessness as the pre-condition, both ethical and imaginative, for defining hospitality, our ways of relating to others, as others. The novel’s aporetic conclusion reduces the novel’s protracted engagement with hospitality and its absence to the simple gesture of accepting what comes (à venir), a gesture that will, in the end, provide a future (l’avenir). Derrida’s meditations on hospitality repeatedly invoke the mythic figure of Oedipus, and this essay concludes by suggesting that reading Oedipus’ death as a final, transgressive act of hospitality might spark new insights into the man’s death in The Road as well as how a Derridean reading of the impossible poetics of hospitality in The Road prompts a similarly productive engagement with time in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. |
| Page range | pp. 215–237 |
| Print length | 23 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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Carol Dougherty is Professor of Classical Studies and Director of Comparative Literary Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of several books and articles on the literature, politics, and history of mobility and settlement in archaic and classical Greece, including The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey (2011) and, most recently, Travel and Home in Homer and Contemporary Literature (2019). Her current research approaches Greek tragedy within the discourse of hospitality, exploring the political and ethical issues raised by narratives about welcoming the foreigner on the Athenian stage.