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 5 - The Spontaneous Aesthetic in The Subterraneans
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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
In 1959, literary critic Warren Tallman published a landmark study of Kerouac’s spontaneous method that focused on The Subterraneans, a novel Kerouac wrote over the course of just three days in 1953. This chapter builds on Tallman’s work (and other subsequent scholarship) to show how Kerouac adopted the use of spontaneity from what he understood to be a jazz aesthetic, purposively repudiating the reigning New Critical norms that dictated “good” fiction must exhibit certain kinds of “unity” and “selectivity” of expression. This chapter therefore takes The Subterraneans as a concentrated case study in how Kerouac composes, rehearses and constructs a Spontaneous Prose text.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac , pp. 67 - 81Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024