Understanding Colum McCann

John Cusatis

Description

The first critical approach to the literary career of the 2009 National Book Award winner

Understanding Colum McCann chronicles the Irish-born writer's journey to literary celebrity from his days as a teenage sportswriter for the Irish Press in the 1970s, through the publication of his award-winning first story, "Tresses," in 1990, to his winning the 2009 National Book Award in fiction for the international bestseller Let the Great World Spin. In this first critical study of McCann's body of work, John Cusatis provides an introduction to McCann's life and career; an overview of his major themes, style, and influences; and close readings of his two short story collections and five novels.

Cusatis traces McCann's redefinition of the Irish novel, exploring the author's propensity for transcending aesthetic, cultural, ethnic, geographical, and social boundaries in his ascent from the status of "Irish novelist" to "international novelist." In the process, this study illuminates the various incarnations of McCann's perennial subject: exile, both geographical and emotional. Cusatis also delineates how the influences of McCann's Irish upbringing, penchant for international travel, and exhaustive and eclectic reading of literature manifest themselves in his fiction. Close attention is given to McCann's stylistic trademarks, such as his poetic voice, use of Christian symbolism, Irish and classical mythology, intertextuality, multiple viewpoints, nonlinear plot structure, and the merger of what McCann deems "factual truth" and "textual truth."

Understanding Colum McCann makes use of the existing body of published interviews, profiles, and critical articles, as well as a decade of correspondence between Cusatis and McCann. With international interest in McCann on the rise, this first full-length study of his career to date serves as an ideal point of entrance for students, scholars, and serious readers, and offers the biographical and critical foundation necessary for a deeper understanding of McCann's fiction.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• Our Choice
• Maggie O'Farrell
• Suttree
• Stephen Dedalus
• Supplication
• Nostalgia
• General officer
• Cú Chulainn
• Daniel Berrigan
• John Cheever
• General
• Sherwood Anderson
• American
• John McGahern
• Colum McCann
• William Styron
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Carson McCullers
• Nick Hornby
• Seamus Heaney
• Cúchulainn
• Tuatha Dé Danann
• William Faulkner

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 24 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172218
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING COLUM McCANN

Understanding Contemporary American Literature
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Series Editor
Volumes on
Edward Albee Sherman Alexie Nicholson Baker John Barth
Donald Barthelme The Beats Thomas Berger
The Black Mountain Poets Robert Bly T. C. Boyle Raymond Carver
Fred Chappell Chicano Literature Contemporary American Drama
Contemporary American Horror Fiction
Contemporary American Literary Theory
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926-1970
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970-2000
Contemporary Chicana Literature Robert Coover Philip K. Dick
James Dickey E. L. Doctorow Rita Dove John Gardner
George Garrett Tim Gautreaux John Hawkes Joseph Heller
Lillian Hellman Beth Henley John Irving Randall Jarrell
Charles Johnson Adrienne Kennedy William Kennedy Jack Kerouac
Jamaica Kincaid Tony Kushner Ursula K. Le Guin Denise Levertov
Bernard Malamud Bobbie Ann Mason Colum McCann
Cormac McCarthy Jill McCorkle Carson McCullers W. S. Merwin
Arthur Miller Lorrie Moore Toni Morrison s Fiction
Vladimir Nabokov Gloria Naylor Joyce Carol Oates
Tim O Brien Flannery O Connor Cynthia Ozick Walker Percy
Katherine Anne Porter Richard Powers Reynolds Price Annie Proulx
Thomas Pynchon Theodore Roethke Philip Roth
May Sarton Hubert Selby, Jr. Mary Lee Settle Neil Simon
Isaac Bashevis Singer Jane Smiley Gary Snyder
William Stafford Anne Tyler Gerald Vizenor Kurt Vonnegut
David Foster Wallace Robert Penn Warren James Welch
Eudora Welty Tennessee Williams August Wilson Charles Wright
UNDERSTANDING COLUM McCANN
John Cusatis
2011 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Cusatis, John.
Understanding Colum McCann / John Cusatis.
p. cm. - (Understanding contemporary American literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-949-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. McCann, Colum, 1965- I. Title.
PR6063.C335Z46 2011
823 .914-dc22
[B]
2010025484
ISBN 978-1-61117-221-8 (ebook)
For my father and mother, Maurice and Theresa Cusatis; my brother, Matthew; my wife, Anna; and my children, Giovanni, Luciano, and Annabella
There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Contents
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Understanding Colum McCann
Chapter 2
Fishing the Sloe-Black River
Chapter 3
Songdogs
Chapter 4
This Side of Brightness
Chapter 5
Everything in This Country Must
Chapter 6
Dancer
Chapter 7
Zoli
Chapter 8
Let the Great World Spin
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Series Editor s Preface
The volumes of Understanding Contemporary American Literature have been planned as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers. The editor and publisher perceive a need for these volumes because much of the influential contemporary literature makes special demands. Uninitiated readers encounter difficulty in approaching works that depart from the traditional forms and techniques of prose and poetry. Literature relies on conventions, but the conventions keep evolving; new writers form their own conventions-which in time may become familiar. Put simply, UCAL provides instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-identifying and explicating their material, themes, use of language, point of view, structures, symbolism, and responses to experience.
The word understanding in the titles was deliberately chosen. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, what the author is at -tempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Although the criticism and analysis in the series have been aimed at a level of general accessibility, these introductory volumes are meant to be applied in conjunction with the works they cover. They do not provide a substitute for the works and authors they introduce, but rather prepare the reader for more profitable literary experiences.
M.J.B.
Acknowledgments
I w ould like to acknowledge the inestimable influence and kindness of two educators: Dr. Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), University of South Carolina professor, scholar, and editor; and Mrs. Rose Maree Myers, founder of the School of the Arts in Charleston, South Carolina, to whom I am forever grateful. My academic career can be divided into two distinct parts: before and after meeting them.
I would also like to thank Colum McCann for his generosity toward my students and me. Finally I extend my gratitude to Judith Baughman, Dom Cassise, Anna Cusatis, Jim Denton, Lauren DiNicola, Harold and Katie Johnson, Rene Miles, Collins Rice, Karen Rood, Marjory Wentworth, and my students at the School of the Arts.
CHAPTER 1

Understanding Colum McCann
Career
Colum McCann has said that the book he most enjoyed as a child was The Second-Best Children in the World (1972) by the Irish writer Mary Lavin. The memory of it is like bread coming out of the oven, he recalls. 1 Lavin s story involves three young children who leave home to make their parents lives easier. After claiming to have seen every place in the world, the children realize that the best place of all is home, and they return to the warm embrace of their parents. 2 In his twenty-year career as a fiction writer, McCann has continued to be drawn to the idea of leaving home and finding one s way back, on both a literal and a metaphorical level. Since 1986, when he left his native Ireland at the age of twenty-one and rode a bicycle across North America, he has wandered the globe searching what he has frequently called its anonymous corners -Russian military hospitals, New York City subway tunnels, Slovakian Gypsy camps-for stories. In his seven books, McCann has written poetically rendered tales of loss and redemption, stories that tend to trace the often heart-wrenching plight of lonely, disillusioned characters- geographical or emotional exiles-who cling to the often-tenuous hope that they will somehow find their way home.
Colum McCann was born on 28 February 1965 in Dublin and grew up in the suburb of Deansgrange, where he attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools. Sean McCann, his father, who worked as the features editor for the Evening Press in Dublin and published twenty-eight books of his own, encouraged and nurtured his son s love of books. Sean McCann was an eclectic author, choosing subjects as diverse as Oscar Wilde, gardening, and a fictional child soccer star named Georgie Goode, the underdog hero of a series of children s books that had a powerful, lingering impact on Colum. His fifth-grade teacher, he recalls, used to read these books aloud to the class on Friday afternoons: I remember that moment of intense pride when Georgie would score the final goal. He d bury it in the back of the net. It was always inevitable, but amazing how he got to that moment of inevitability. And I was stunned by the power of story, even then. 3 Not surprisingly McCann s first effort at professional writing was an early stint as a sportswriter. At the age of eleven he began riding his bicycle through the borough of Dun Laoghaire, collecting results of the local soccer matches, and writing one-paragraph reports for the Irish Press. McCann s mother, Sally McGonigle McCann, a homemaker, was born in Garvagh in County Derry, Northern Ireland, where Colum spent many summers in the 1970s and early 1980s. His experiences in that politically anguished region have also had a significant impact on his fiction.
Sean McCann made periodic trips to America-where he lectured on cultivating roses-and brought back books for his teenage son, who quickly gained an affinity for writers associated with the Beat movement, especially Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, in whose work McCann found a liberating alternative to the sorrow-filled traditional Irish stories he read in school. During the summer preceding his senior year in high school, his father gave him Benedict Kiely s A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly, a short story that thrilled Colum with the possibilities of Irish fiction. What moved him most about this ribald account of the unlikely romance of a literary aesthete and a prostitute was Kiely s language, which he felt vied with that of his favorite poet at that time, Dylan Thomas, whose books, McCann claims, were strewn all about our house. 4 On graduation he decided he would write, and-against his father s advice-he embarked on a career in journalism. He reflects, I think maybe he told me not to be a journalist because he wanted me to become a fiction writer, and he was afraid that the world of journalism would swallow me asunder. 5
McCann enrolled in the journalism program of the College of Commerce, Rathmines, in Dublin, and in 1983 he was named Young Journalist of the Year for his highly acclaimed reporting on the plight of battered women in Dublin. While researching the story, McCann ventured for the first time into the seediest sections of the city, an act foreshadowing the intrepid and compassionate attraction to the margins of society that continues to characterize his work. During the summer of 1983 he wrote for the Connaught Telegraph, Castlebar, County Mayo, in the west of Ireland, a region for which he developed a strong affinity and which appears frequently in his early fiction. McCann graduated from Rathmines in 1984 at the age of nineteen and made his first trip to America. That summer he worked for the Universal Press Syndicate in New York while renting a one-room apartment on Brig