Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals

This long overdue reevaluation of Jack Kerouac gives fresh perspectives on his unique literary output, his vexed relation to issues of race, class, and gender, as well as his continuing cultural afterlife. This collection of essays by esteemed Beat commentators reassesses one of the 20th century's most emblematic but often misunderstood American writers. Despite amassing a substantial body of influential work and becoming a recognizable icon globally, Kerouac has often suffered critical neglect, and this volume seeks to offer a range of fresh perspectives on his unique artistic output as well as his continuing cultural afterlife. Through an examination of classic texts like On the Road to more obscure ones like Pic, these essays recalibrate our understanding of the writer by placing his creative output into dialogue with current cultural issues to provide a rethinking of how concerns such as race, gender relations, artificial intelligence, populist rhetoric, and queerness inform his work and its contemporary reception. These essays also examine how the peculiarities of global circulation and social media influence the ongoing cultural appropriation of Kerouac in popular music, literature, and online. Through these varied approaches, Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals provides an indispensable account of the continued relevance of both Kerouac the writer and Kerouac the cultural icon in the 21st century.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Foreword A. Robert Lee, Emeritus, Nihon University, Tokyo Acknowledgments Introduction Erik Mortenson, Lake Michigan College, USA and Tomasz Sawczuk, University of Bialystok, Poland Part I. Rethinking the Writing 1. Reading a Copy of On the Road Matt Theado, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan 2. Choruses for Kerouac Aldon Nielsen, Penn State University, USA 3. Jack Kerouac's Paintings: Color, Texture, Movement Frida Forsgren, University of Agder, Norway 4. A House of Mirrors at Coney Island: Kerouac's Obscure Experiments in Screenwriting Brett Sigurdson, Independent Scholar, USA 5. Lonesome Traveler, Buddhism, and the Fictions of Kerouac's Non-Fiction Steven Belletto, Lafayette College, USA 6. “Radical Vulnerability” in Kerouac's Big Sur, Satori in Paris, and Vanity of Duluoz Deborah R. Geis, DePauw University, USA Part II. Kerouac and the Social 7. Anti-homosexual Paranoia, Queer Love, and Cold War Poetics in Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody Pierre-Antoine Pellerin, University of Lyon 3 – Jean Moulin, France 8. Teaching Kerouac in the Time of Trump: An Orwellian Approach to The Dharma Bums John Whalen-Bridge, National University of Singapore 9. Recovering Jack Kerouac's Blackface Novel Pic Kurt Hemmer, Harper College, USA 10. Jack Kerouac and the Language of Populism Nancy M. Grace, The College of Wooster, USA 11. Kerouac's Fellahin Poetics: Reimagining Global Culture against Nation and Empire Hassan Melehy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Part III. Kerouac's Influence and Legacy 12. From Beat Generation to Hacker Generation: The Experimental Road Narratives On the Road and 1 the Road Peggy Pacini, CY Paris Cergy Université / UMR 922 – Héritages, France 13. Kerouac's Enduring Influence on Anglo-American Popular Music Composers and Performers Simon Warner, University of Leeds, UK 14. Jack Kerouac: American Avatar Ronna C. Johnson, Tufts University, USA 15. The Futures of Kerouac's Past: Public Humanities and the Kerouac Archive at 100 Michael Millner, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, USA 16. Kerouac in Translation: A Conversation with Farid Ghadami, Minami Aoyama, and Maciej Swierkocki Erik Mortenson, Lake Michigan College, USA and Tomasz Sawczuk, University of Bialystok, Poland Afterword Tim Hunt, Emeritus, Illinois State University, USA Notes on Contributors Index

About the Author :
Erik Mortenson is a Faculty Member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Mortenson has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as several books, including Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), which won a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award; Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016); and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). He has also published The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation (2023), co-edited with Tony Trigilio, along with the memoir Kick Out the Bottom (2023), co-written with Christopher Kramer. Mortenson is also a translator whose work has appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines. Tomasz Sawczuk is Assistant Professor at University of Bialystok, Poland. In 2022 he was a Visiting Research Scholar at Fordham University, USA. Among his publications on Beat writers, film and popular culture are On the Road to Lost Fathers: Jack Kerouac in a Lacanian Perspective (2019) and a chapter contribution to The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature (2018). He also co-edited Visuality and Vision in American Literature (2014).

Review :
Moving beyond hagiographic portraits of the reluctant 'King of the Beats,' this fresh volume of essays grounds Kerouac in the shifting political and cultural background of mid-20th century America. The essays grapple with the writer's inconsistencies and lay bare some of the recalcitrant myths about the writer and his work. Coming as it does in the wake of the Kerouac centenary, the essays gathered here remind us of the immense, ongoing, and indelible importance Jack Kerouac continues to have on global literature and culture. Rethinking Kerouac is both a celebration of Kerouac's many achievements as a writer and a reckoning with his status as exemplar of what the editors call “the problematics of mid-century culture.” As such, it is a timely occasion for readers to rethink and reassess Kerouac's ever-evolving legacy alongside contributions by seasoned and emergent voices in Kerouac Studies. So much has been written about Kerouac by so many scholars that it sometimes feels there is nothing left to say, but this wonderful collection provides many new interpretations, including studies of his lesser-known efforts in screenwriting and his influence on musicians. It is a much-needed critical reappraisal of a complex figure and his divisive work.