Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac
- The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- A Kerouac Chronology
- Additional material
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Kerouac’s Concept of His Duluoz Legend
- Chapter 2 Kerouac and the Profession of Authorship
- Chapter 3 Truth in Confession
- Chapter 4 The Textuality of Performance
- Chapter 5 The Spontaneous Aesthetic in The Subterraneans
- Chapter 6 Kerouac and the 1950s
- Chapter 7 The Impact of On the Road on the 1960s Counterculture
- Chapter 8 Vanity of Duluoz and the 1960s
- Chapter 9 Late Kerouac, or the Conflicted “King of the Beatniks”
- Chapter 10 Visions of Cody as Metafiction
- Chapter 11 Making the Past Present
- Chapter 12 Spun Rhythms
- Chapter 13 Kerouac’s Representations of Women
- Chapter 14 Kerouac and Blackness
- Chapter 15 Kerouac, Multilingualism, and Global Culture
- Chapter 16 The Two Phases of Jack Kerouac’s American Buddhism
- Chapter 17 Jack Kerouac’s Ambivalences as an Environmental Writer
- Chapter 18 The Essentials of Archival Prose
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Chapter 15 - Kerouac, Multilingualism, and Global Culture
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- The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac
- The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- A Kerouac Chronology
- Additional material
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Kerouac’s Concept of His Duluoz Legend
- Chapter 2 Kerouac and the Profession of Authorship
- Chapter 3 Truth in Confession
- Chapter 4 The Textuality of Performance
- Chapter 5 The Spontaneous Aesthetic in The Subterraneans
- Chapter 6 Kerouac and the 1950s
- Chapter 7 The Impact of On the Road on the 1960s Counterculture
- Chapter 8 Vanity of Duluoz and the 1960s
- Chapter 9 Late Kerouac, or the Conflicted “King of the Beatniks”
- Chapter 10 Visions of Cody as Metafiction
- Chapter 11 Making the Past Present
- Chapter 12 Spun Rhythms
- Chapter 13 Kerouac’s Representations of Women
- Chapter 14 Kerouac and Blackness
- Chapter 15 Kerouac, Multilingualism, and Global Culture
- Chapter 16 The Two Phases of Jack Kerouac’s American Buddhism
- Chapter 17 Jack Kerouac’s Ambivalences as an Environmental Writer
- Chapter 18 The Essentials of Archival Prose
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
This chapter shows how part of Kerouac’s motivations for his literary experiments was to bring English closer to himself and at the same time to move it away from the monolingualism that dominated US literature and culture. He aimed to create a prose that in its syntax, vocabulary, and rhythms was open to foreignness, which many critics and scholars both then and now have taken for simply bad writing. Though French was his starting point, he wanted to bring American English closer to all languages. Correlatively, in his fiction he depicts peoples of a variety of ethnic and linguistic heritages. In On the Road, the road is Sal Paradise’s means to encounter these different populations and their languages, the place where they all encounter each other. In his other novels, Kerouac paints tenderly detailed pictures of the Franco-American population of Lowell, Massachusetts that he hailed from, as well as towns and cities in places such as France and North Africa. This chapter shows that a major impulse of his writing is to imagine a utopia of global cultural and convergence and to contribute to ushering it into existence.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac , pp. 207 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024