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"jack kerouac"
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Mañana means heaven
Set against an ominous backdrop of California in the 1940's, deep in the agricultural heartland of the Great Central Valley, \"Manana Means Heaven\" reveals the desperate circumstances that lead a married woman to an illicit affair with an young, aspiring writer.
BOOK
What the Archive Teaches Us: On the Road's Blended Textuality
If the changes Kerouac made to the novel after the scroll draft and before Viking house-styled and sanitized it were primarily cuts and reworkings to make the novel more conventional and thus publishable, Ginsberg's criticism would still hold. The archival material, that is, reveals On the Road as published as a work that integrates multiple moments and stages of composition as well as several compositional procedures, and these enrich rather than undermine the achievement of the novel (in spite of the meddling of Viking's copy editors). The style and narrative strategy of the scroll afforded a horizontal, documentary account of the events of the road but failed to express his vertical, lyrical, and metaphysical understanding of the characters and kernels of his road story.5 Writing in July of 1951 to John Clellon Holmes about his desire to find a new form that could simultaneously convey the prose reality of the road while adding the poetic, visionary dimension of the road and thereby supply what he felt was missing from the scroll, Kerouac stated: When I get to be so pure you won't be able to bear the thought of my death on a starry night (right now I've nothing to do with stars, I've lied so far) it will be when I'll have come to know and tell the truth (all of it in every conceivable mask) and yet digress from that to my lyric-alto knowing of this land...a deep form bringing together two ultimate and at present conflicting streaks in me.
Journal Article
The Dharma Bums: A (Fictional) Pseudo-Buddhist Hagiography, or a Pseudo-ojoden
This paper analyses Jack Kerouac’s brief but intense conversion to American pseudo-Buddhism and the artistic effect of this biographical development, arguing that his conversion was total from a spiritual point of view and that its almost immediate effect was the production of a literary piece which should be read as a (fictional) pseudo-Buddhist hagiography, or a pseudo-ojoden. The article investigates Jack Kerouac’s life as the life of a modern American Buddha, as a person engaged in a constant quest for spiritual enlightenment, who imbued his work with a spiritual feeling derived from his personal, direct, albeit limited experience with spirituality. His novel, The Dharma Bums, is a (fictional) pseudo-Buddhist hagiography because it is (auto)biographical, and the central characters are portrayed as enlightened, “holy” beings.
Journal Article
Kerouac : language, poetics, and territory
\"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\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Slow Reading On the Road: Toward an Appreciation of Kerouac's Prose Artistry
Here, then, is a novel where it seems our focus can be on what is represented, and where how the fictional world is expressed is of little concern-a novel, then, to read quickly as the car speeds along, scenes flashing past the window, and no need to glance in the rearview mirror. The drafting of the scroll On the Road shows Kerouac, I'd suggest, shifting away from treating writing as a medium for composing, and moving instead toward treating writing as a medium for recording performing-and this made possible by his speed as a typist and by using a continuous roll of paper so that he did not have to disrupt the momentum of performance by stopping to feed in a new sheet every few hundred words.3 In performance, the writer enacts and elaborates known source material and procedures, reacting to the possibilities of the material in the moment of, and within the momentum of, the performing. Recordings, such as \"Embraceable You,\" typically exist in multiple takes recorded in a single session, and these takes demonstrate how he re-engaged his source material in a series or set of performances, altering his stance and approach and, in the process, discovering and elaborating alternate possibilities to generate a series of alternate performed realizations. By and large, these pieces have remained unexamined, probably in part because their listing on the copyright page points to them as merely extracts from the finished novel published to help generate interest in the book or perhaps preliminary versions superseded by the published novel.
Journal Article
The unknown Kerouac : rare, unpublished, & newly translated writings
Presents a collection of never-before-published and newly translated writings by the legendary author and provides insight into his path to a wholly new style of storytelling.
BOOK
Ancestral Uprooting and Literary Homecomings: Kerouac's \Return\ to Brittany
An analysis of archival material, with special attention paid to his unpublished typescript entitled \"Notes on Brittany,\" alongside published texts uncovers both the importance of the Breton region in his work and the ways in which the region-its geography, language, and culture-represented a source of stylistic and literary inspiration, as well as a romanticized and mythologized figuration of cultural and spiritual otherness. In his foundational study of the form of Kerouac's prose, The Textuality of Soulwork (2014), Tim Hunt convincingly argues that Kerouac's view of the writing process as a performance reflected his understanding of writing and was \"a way to treat writing as performed language recorded in writing rather than think of writing as something to be composed\" (64). \"Because Kerouac's writing is performed,\" Hunt argues, \"we engage the process of him enacting himself through his material, moment by moment, discovering dimensions of both himself and his material\" (155). In his study of Kerouac's Francophone linguistic heritage and French language writing, Hassan Melehy builds on Hunt's discussion of \"blowing\" and argues that this understanding of the writing process furthermore conveys Kerouac's multilingual identity and his \"outsider\" relationship with the English language.
Journal Article
Ethnicity and Gender in the Beat Generation
Pivoting around the contrast between Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Tim Z. Hernandez’s Mañana Means Heaven (2013), this article reopens debates about ethnic appropriation and rhetorical control in the Beat Generation. More specifically, it sets out to investigate whether the textual strategies used in Mañana Means Heaven allow ethnic minorities to escape the discursive control exerted by On the Road. Keeping in mind that Hernandez’s text acts as a counter-discursive text to Kerouac’s representation of Bea Franco (aka “the Mexican girl”) this article analyzes the different dialogues Mañana Means Heaven necessarily establishes with On the Road, which often include alliances as well as points of departure.
Journal Article