Facing Old Age and Searching for Regeneration in a Dying American WestGregory Martin’s Mountain City

  1. David Río 1
  1. 1 Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
    info

    Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

    Lejona, España

    ROR https://ror.org/000xsnr85

Revista:
Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

ISSN: 0210-6124

Año de publicación: 2016

Volumen: 38

Número: 1

Páginas: 149-164

Tipo: Artículo

DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Otras publicaciones en: Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

Resumen

Contemporary western American literature is increasingly departing from the traditional association between the West and youth in classical frontier mythology, showing an aging, gray and often ill West, as illustrated by authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stegner and Ken Haruf, to name just a few examples. This perspective also plays a powerful role in Gregory Martin’s Mountain City (2000), an impressive memoir about a decaying Nevada mining town and its aging population. This article explores the interaction between living and aging in Martin’s book. It is often a continuous dialogical process of exchange and overlap where Martin revises western mythology centered on the youth trope and deconstructs negative images of old age and disease. Martin offers a realistic portrait of a fading western way of life. However, his emphasis on the vanishing condition of traditional western stereotypes turns out to be problematic. In fact, Martin’s bleak vision of the Old West and its broken promises coexists in Mountain City with his recognition of the pervasive quality of the archetypal western regenerative influence, as exemplified by the power of this declining community to heal the narrator’s placelessness and provide him with a sense of “homeplace” and a cultural identity.

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Fuente de los datos: Dialnet