One hundred years after his birth, Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) is one of the most highly regarded US authors worldwide. Nonetheless, in his home country he still has a reputation as a drugged-out hack. But as scholars such as Steven Belletto and Hassan Melehy have recently shown, much of this impression of Kerouac and the Beat Generation stems from early critical responses, when journalists and academics were eager to find fault with a group of writers who openly rejected dominant sexual morality and values of economic success. The ensuing “Beatnik” caricature entailed a view of these authors’ literary experiments—rooted in the work of such precursors as Rimbaud, Proust, Joyce, and the Surrealists—as unschooled clumsiness.
Kerouac especially continues to bear the brunt of academic and journalistic scorn for his “spontaneous prose.” But in this practice of writing quickly with minimal revision, he took inspiration from the power of improvisational jazz to remake traditional forms and hence enable the expression of previously unheard voices. One of Kerouac’s stated interests was to reveal the everyday experiences of Franco-Americans: between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 inhabitants of Québec came to the US, often meeting an unfriendly reception. Hailing from the large Francophone community of Lowell, Massaschusetts, Kerouac was keenly aware of the migration. As Melehy has shown, a key motive for his literary experiments was to bring English, his adopted language, into contact with French, his native language.
More broadly, he sought to open Anglophone American literature to perspectives that it culturally excluded. In On the Road (1957), the road figures migration, leading to encounters with a range of communities in the US and Mexico. Well before literary criticism came to a global perspective, he attempted to expand US literary representation beyond the West: this is part of what fueled his long-term interest in Buddhism, on which he wrote extensively in notebooks, poetry, and novels. Although many have dismissed Kerouac’s Buddhism as simplistic and even Orientalist musings, a number of scholars view his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums to be a major turning point in the growth of serious interest in Buddhism in the US.
The hundredth anniversary of Kerouac’s birth offers scholars the occasion to reflect on the immense changes in the critical reception of his work since his untimely death in 1969 at age forty-seven. These changes reflect some of the ways that literary criticism itself has furthered its horizons. The three papers in this special session each address this shift in the view of Kerouac from a naïve scribbler to a dedicated author who relentlessly pushed back against the perspectival limitations of dominant American culture in the post–1945 era.
Ronna Johnson surveys the critical reception itself, highlighting the recent studies by Tim Hunt, Melehy, and Manuel Luis Martínez that situate Kerouac within scholarly approaches that have emerged in the last several decades. In a tie-in to this year’s Presidential Theme, Johnson shows how recent Kerouac scholarship reveals the complex, often paradoxical character of Kerouac’s multilingual and multicultural challenges to Anglo-American hegemony in North America, such as taking advantage of white imperial privilege in order to valorize Latinx and Mexican experience. Eric Strand examines the ways that On the Road refutes a common understanding of the novel’s narrator, Sal Paradise, as a blissfully unaware, consumerist rugged individual. Strand argues that since Sal’s travels are made possible by the GI Bill, a major factor in social and economic realignment following the Second World War, On the Road presents a blueprint for liberal collectivism, presaging contemporary causes such as the Green New Deal, student loan forgiveness, and reparations for slavery. Finally, Kurt Spellmeyer tackles Kerouac’s Buddhist studies. A scholar of Buddhism and Zen priest, Spellmeyer challenges the common understanding of Kerouac’s Buddhism as a failed, superficial endeavor. Spellmeyer argues that Kerouac’s struggle to understand key Mahāyāna Buddhist texts led him to a more intellectually inclusive and psychologically adventurous version of the dharma, akin to that of the Hua-yen and Tiantai schools. This is a dharma that, Spellmeyer explains, many Asian Buddhists have also recently come to.
After each presenter speaks for seventeen minutes, the presider will open the session to questions from the audience.