This work revolves round the analysis of Jack Kerouac's complex identity and his main artistic inspirations. Even though the writer was born in Lowell, MA, he was raised in a Franco-American family with strong bonds with the Quebec region. The resultant split identity led to deep existential doubts that Kerouac was never able to overcome. However, the awareness of his cultural dichotomy proved extremely important for his own work. Indeed, the Beat author was able to reach an original poetics which was inspired by both American and French writers. Despite Kerouac's innovative style and writing method, an analysis of the artists who influenced his work could help contextualize and better understand his literary and linguistic genius.
This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression, romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas – ideas that doubted human perfectibility, spurned the majority for a spiritually elect few, and had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of icons in the counterculture – the controversial sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed ‘philosopher of hip’, Norman Mailer – Guy Stevenson explores a set of paradoxes at its centre: between romantic optimism and modernist pessimism; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, Stevenson argues, help explain the cultural and political worlds these writers shaped – in their time and beyond.
This volume invites the reader to join in with the recent focus on subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging with the social and historical changes in the world through storytelling. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology has been criticized for losing its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, as a consequence of this, ethnographic scope has opened towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnography. The collection of essays re-introduces the importance of authorship in relationship to readership, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictional texts and images as cultural, sociological, and political reflections of the time and place in which they were produced. In this way, the contributors here contribute to the widening of the ethnographic scope of contemporary anthropology. A number of the chapters were presented as papers in two conferences organised by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, entitled “Arts and aesthetics in a globalising world” (2012), and at the University of Exeter, entitled “Symbiotic Anthropologies” (2015). Each chapter offers a unique method of working in the grey area between and beyond the categories of fiction and non-fiction, while creatively reflecting upon current methodological, ethical, and theoretical issues, in anthropology and cultural studies. This is an important book for undergraduate and post-graduate students of anthropology, cultural and media studies, art theory, and creative writing, as well as academic researchers in these fields.
This book examines the poetries of two Aboriginal Australian poets, namely Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker; 1920–1993) and Lionel Fogarty (1958– ) and two African American Black Arts poets , namely Amiri Baraka (formerly Everett LeRoi Jones; 1934–2014) and Sonia Sanchez (1943– ) to demonstrate their role in the struggle for civil and human rights of their peoples from the 1960s. The book demonstrates commonalities and differences in the strategies of these poets’ literary and political resistance. These poet-activists, though ethnically diverse and geographically dispersed, share comparable socio-political concerns and aspirations. Their activism is not a reflection of a single ideological current, but a bricolage of many ideologies and perspectives. They have engaged in trans-Pacific political movements and transgressed the borders of any one ideological territory. It is important to establish Aboriginal and African American trans-Pacific communication because these poets have collaborated and engaged in global politics (whether in the form of Garveyism or the “transnation”). Their poetries are characterized by an irresistible drive towards international rhizomatic collaboration and engagement. This is a transcontinental literary influence exerted by African American poets on Aboriginal poets during the 1960s and beyond.
He was the leading light of the Beat Generation writers and the most dynamic author of his time, but Jack Kerouac also had a lifelong passion for music, particularly the mid-century jazz of New York City, the development of which he witnessed first-hand during the 1940s with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to the fore. The novelist, most famous for his 1957 book On the Road, admired the sounds of bebop and attempted to bring something of their original energy to his own writing, a torrent of semi-autobiographical stories he published between 1950 and his early death in 1969. Yet he was also drawn to American popular music of all kinds � from the blues to Broadway ballads � and when he came to record albums under his own name, he married his unique spoken word style with some of the most talented musicians on the scene. Kerouac's musical legacy goes well beyond the studio recordings he made himself: his influence infused generations of music makers who followed in his work � from singer-songwriters to rock bands. Some of the greatest transatlantic names � Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison and David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Tom Waits, Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie, and many more � credited Kerouac's impact on their output. In Kerouac on Record, we consider how the writer brought his passion for jazz to his prose and poetry, his own record releases, the ways his legacy has been sustained by numerous more recent talents, those rock tributes that have kept his memory alive and some of the scores that have featured in Hollywood adaptations of the adventures he brought to the printed page.
Beards and Masculinity in American Literature is a pioneering study of the symbolic power of the beard in the history of American writing. This book covers the entire breadth of American writing – from 18th century American newspapers and periodicals through the 19th and 20th centuries to recent contemporary engagements with the beard and masculinity. With chapters focused on the barber and the barbershop in American writing, the "need for a shave" in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, Whitman’s beard as a sanctuary for poets reaching out to the bearded bard, and the contemporary re-engagement with the beard as a symbol of Otherness in post-9/11 fiction, Beards and Masculinity in American Literature underlines the symbolic power of facial hair in key works of American writing.
In the post-World War II era, authors of the beat generation produced some of the most enduring literature of the day. More than six decades since, work of the Beat Poets conjures images of unconventionality, defiance, and a changing consciousness that permeated the 1950s and 60s. In recent years, the key texts of Beat authors such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac have been appropriated for a new generation in feature-length films, graphic novels, and other media. In Adapting the Beat Poets: Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouc on Screen, Michael J.Prince examines how works by these authors have been translated to film. Looking primarily at three key works—Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Ginsberg’s Howl, and Kerouac’s On the Road—Prince considers how Beat literature has been significantly altered by the unintended intrusion of irony or other inflections. Prince also explores how these screen adaptations offer evidence of a growing cultural thirst for authenticity, even as mediated in postmodern works. Additional works discussed in this volume include The Subterraneans, Towers Open Fire, The Junky's Christmas,and Big Sur. By examining the screen versions of the Beat triumvirate’s creations, this volume questions the ways in which their original works serve as artistic anchors and whether these films honor the authentic intent of the authors. Adapting the Beat Poets is a valuable resource for anyone studying the beat generation, including scholars of literature, film, and American history.
Given Jack Kerouac's enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word “poetics.” But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous “spontaneous prose” only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice. Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to the French language and the reason for his bilingualism, the Québec Diaspora. Although this background has long been recognized in French-language treatments, it is a new dimension in Anglophone studies of his writing. In a theoretically informed discussion, Hassan Melehy explores how Kerouac's poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a naïve pursuit, Kerouac's writing practice not only responded but contributed to some of the major aesthetic and philosophical currents of the twentieth century in which notions such as otherness and nomadism took shape. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a major reassessment of a writer who, despite a readership that extends over much of the globe, remains poorly appreciated at home.
With the sweep of an epic novel, Michael Schumacher tells the story of Allen Ginsberg and his times, with fascinating portraits of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs, among others, along with many rarely seen photographs.
