Thoughts on Jack Kerouac

Taking its initial motivation from the Sermon on the Mount and latter-days writers as diverse in vision as Jack Kerouac, Mother Angelica, Gilles Deleuze, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Beatitude stands for the self-convicted state of high-holy vision in which the lowly becomes exalted and can activate the deepest forces and ideals and principles of poetic polity. These states are forces of "beatitude" and high-holyness still crucial to the poetics and politics of the post-Beat writer: forces of election and chosen vocation that Emerson and others, from Jesus to Spinoza and Blake, had endorsed as active joy and the felt good news of blessedness inter-animating the self to others and the world to life-renewal. This collage-like work of sources, influences, rebirths, and deaths, comprises an inter-linked glossary for what Beatitude (Beat/Attitude) means and has meant, and shows how “the vocation to beatitude” still moves as a force of empowerment across time and space, activating some kind of influx from the Holy Spirit or from the Over-soul or individual Godhead that allows one to write, to think, to act, to love, to renew the world each day, to make it new, to hitch the self into the drafts of breath and wind and spirit.

2016

, they believed, truly serve India's needs, and their example highlights the multivalent legacies of European imperialism, the complexities of decolonization, and, to a much greater extent than has been acknowledged, the interest of Beat Generation writers in such matters. The tensions within Bengali intellectual life and among Kolkata's adda poets: between the past and the present, colonial rule and national in dependence, "their gods" and "the gods of modernism," as Deborah Baker puts it, mean that India for Ginsberg is not timeless or unchanging or utterly exotic (hallmarks of orientalist thinking) but vital and dynamic; it retains the specificity of its historical moment and engages with head in North Carolina, Williams had recently made waves by arming the local African American community against the Klan. Williams, who would return to Cuba in 1961, wanted by the FBI, represented a more militant wing of the civil rights movement. He would inspire the future Black Panthers, and his philosophy was something that Baraka began to find more and more appealing as the 1960s wore on. to reassess their place in mid-century American history and literature, to recontextualize Beat writers within the larger arts community of which they were a part, to recover marginalized figures and expand the restricted canon of three to six major figures established from 1956 to 1970, and to critique media stereotypes and popular clichés that influence both academic and popular discourse about the Beats." 8 obstinately U.S.-centric understanding of comparativism in opposition to more capacious and fluid paradigms such as those of Micol Seigel and Wai Chee Dimock. Gillman and Gruesz envision a "transnational analysis [that] would draw multiple circles, replanting the foot of the drawing-compass in different, central points, moving across different scales of observation. In so doing, it aims to avoid what is all too frequently, as Seigel demonstrates, the outcome of comparative analysis: a patronizing affirmation that the Other is different, but essentially just like Us." 13 Their title alone-"Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network"-registers multiple levels of analysis: nation, hemisphere, and world, and within this productive slippage of terms lies the recognition that the hemisphere, like Dimock has been especially interested in the expansive intimacies of writers reading other writers' work-radically transformative events that leave even the most iconic and canonical texts permeated by diverse elements and energies. Within the U.S. canon, this applies to Emerson and Thoreau perhaps above all. In her "Deep Time" essay, Dimock writes, The Transcendentalists were avid readers. Comparative philology and comparative religion-two newly minted disciplines of the nineteenth centurywere high on their reading lists. The relative claims of various civilizations In "Song of Myself" and elsewhere, Whitman praises science and progress per se; here, he singles out technology's ability to "span" the globe, to make "the distant brought near." The earth as "Rondure" could easily become an abstraction without the voluptuousness of the word to make it tangible. And as with Thoreau and Emerson, the physical always has its spiritual counterpart. The flight of the soul has it within its grasp to "Eclaircise the myths Asiatic," which become the necessary analogue of progress (paradoxically into the past). The poem declares, "Nor you alone ye facts of modern science, / But myths and fables of eld, Asia's, Africa's fables, /. .. / You too with joy I sing" (531). But as his song unfolds, the poet becomes plagued with doubt. What next? he asks. We've spanned the globe, but where has it gotten us except right back where we began? The speaker of "Facing West from California's Shores" faces Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta.. .. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. 37 Matthiessen, contrasting Thoreau with John Donne at one point, calls Thoreau's experience "inevitably more literary" and says that "one of his chief distinctions. .. is the infusion of his reading into his percep-The author emphasizes the salutary estrangement involved in such a pursuit when he writes, "Only when we can vividly imagine this fact [of the "bubbles"] will we recognize in our own world the bubble that encloses each and every one of us on all sides." 45 Uexküll's perspective, which radically decenters human consciousness and imagines a dense, rhizomic web of inputs and interactions among all life forms, is picked up by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and has come back to the fore in the field of animal studies and among today's theorists of posthuman biopolitics. This talk of worlds and bubbles is strangely reminiscent of Leibniz even, whose rationalist abstractions seem miles away from Uexküll's empiricist The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark. 51

2012

Keeping the Beat: The Practice of a Beat Movement. (August 2012) Christopher Richard Carmona, B.A., University of Texas-Pan American; M.A., University of Texas at Brownsville Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. M. Jimmie Killingsworth The literary movement of the Beat Generation continues to be a truly influential movement in our current society. From the popularization of hitchhiking across America to the rebel without a cause of James Dean, the Hippie movement of the 60s, and the explosion of poetry readings in coffee shops, the Beats have been influential to much of the social change in the last half-century. Commonly the architects of the movement are referenced as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. However, the Beat Generation was much bigger than six “white” men who wrote novels and poetry about disenfranchised youths of the 1950s. The Beat Generation had at its center several women and artists of color who have helped to redefine the movement, such as Joan V...

The aim of the present study is to account for the significance of mobility in American culture and its reflection in literature. In order to reach this goal, the thesis observes the role of mobility in the history of the United States, its transformation in the twentieth century, and the manifestation of this motif in the works of Jack Kerouac. Through the analysis of his novels, including On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, and Big Sur, the thesis identifies some of the recurrent themes associated with the motif of journey and further interprets them in the context of postwar America. With the support of an array of secondary literature, this research approaches mobility as a constitutive part of the American identity and Jack Kerouac as one of its most ardent advocates.

2011

My thesis explores the role of religion and spirituality in the work of the Beat Generation, a mid-twentieth century American literary movement. I focus on four major Beat authors: William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. Through a close reading of their work, I identify the major religious and spiritual attitudes that shape their texts. All four authors’ religious and spiritual beliefs form a challenge to the Modern Western worldview of rationality, embracing systems of belief which allow for experiences that cannot be empirically explained. They also assert the primacy of the individual—a major American value—in a society which the authors believed to encroach upon individual agency. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso are also strongly influenced by established religious traditions: an aspect of their work that is currently overlooked in Beat criticism. Burroughs’ belief in a magical universe shapes his work. Ginsberg is heavily influenced by the Jewish exe...

2000

Ginsberg are able to transmit the physical and emotional effects of the drug experience to the reader via the medium of the text. The reader thus receives not just an objective account of the drug experience, but becomes privy to the alterations in temporal perception and intersubjective empathy that drug use inaugurates.

Have you ever asked yourself a simple question: Who will lead the world in the future in which our children and grandchildren will live? Will it be America? For example, Alexander Zaets has tried to answer this question. On June 12, 2023, he published an article titled "What Is Biden Preparing for Us?" In it, he based his conclusions on the theory of tendencies, arguing that Biden (or rather, those who stand behind him) would behave like an insensitive and distrustful paranoiac at a critical moment. He claimed this would bring great misfortune to the world, including Russia. That moment has now arrived. The American president has allowed Ukraine (formerly part of Russia) to use long-range missiles against Russian territory. This puts the world on the brink of disaster, as these missiles and their carriers were not produced by Ukraine but by the United States, Great Britain, and their allies, who have thus joined the conflict. "Who can lead the world except the United States of America?" the president declared on August 19. "<...> America is winning, and this is for the benefit of the world." This was not merely a statement for the American public. Biden spoke at the US Democratic National Convention on the eve of the presidential election during a time when America is desperately trying to redefine its leading role in the world to confirm its status as a superpower. This is happening as the world becomes irreversibly multipolar and begins to lose faith in the "American dream," the American currency, military power, and the political influence of the American elite, as well as its government institutions, education, and culture-everything that the so-called "Western world" was based on, if not the entirety of "Western and Christian civilization." Who could have written such nonsense for Biden? After all, we know from live interviews that presidents have not been responsible for creating or voicing their own ideas for a long time-since the Reagan era. As Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States (1981-1989), admitted, a person enters the office each morning with a detailed plan of action and prepared speeches. "I don't know who he is, but he's the one who runs America!" Of course, this raises questions about who is managing him. Who exactly is that? Probably someone who knows more and is smarter than anyone else. But who determines their mental and heuristic abilities? Family, ethnicity, or other clans? Secret services? Please, don't make me laugh. These people are on the other side of good and evil. They seem more interested in playing hide-and-seek with the devil himself than in serving the highest ideals of humanity. And they don't care about the fate of the world or our children.

The Modern Language Journal, 2012

SQS Journal of Queer Studies in Finland, 2023