The Road

Part A – Discussion (700-1000 words) For your final Discussion posting, write a concise essay on ONE of the following topics. Depending on which topic you choose, please label the subject line in your post either REDEMPTION or DYSTOPIA: Option One – REDEMPTION: Literary critics and book reviewers alike have proven that The Road can be read as either a redemptive or non-redemptive text. What is your reading? Thinking back to Shelly Rambo’s essay “Beyond Redemption?: Reading Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ After the End of the World,” do you “interpret the boy’s survival as a testimony to the persistence of hope and regeneration,” or do you “find the notion of a redemptive ending sentimental, unrealistic, and inconsistent with the rest of the book and its unrelenting picture of doom” (100)? Please support your argument with at least three quotations from the novel, at least one from the linked sources in this module’s lesson content, and at least one from a relevant source that is not from the lesson content (please use the Sheridan Library’s electronic database). Quotations must be properly introduced/integrated into your writing and must be cited according to MLA convention. All works cited must be listed at the end of your posting. Option Two – DYSTOPIA: In his Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams tells us that “the term dystopia (‘bad place’) has come to be applied to works of fiction, including science fiction, which represent a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected in some disastrous future culmination” (218). According to this explanation, which “ominous tendencies” of our present world might Cormac McCarthy be trying to “project” in his apocalyptic world of The Road? Further, how does the language and style of The Road reflect this world that he creates? Please support your argument with at least three quotations from the novel, at least one from the linked sources in this module’s lesson content, and at least one from a relevant source that is not from the lesson content (please use the Sheridan Library’s electronic database). Quotations must be properly introduced/integrated into your writing and must be cited according to MLA convention. All works cited must be listed at the end of your posting.