Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

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Given Jack Kerouacs enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word poetics. But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous spontaneous prose only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice. Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to the French language and the reason for his bilingualism, the Qubec Diaspora. Although this background has long been recognized in French-language treatments, it is a new dimension in Anglophone studies of his writing. In a theoretically informed discussion, Hassan Melehy explores how Kerouacs poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a nave pursuit, Kerouacs writing practice not only responded but contributed to some of the major aesthetic and philosophical currents of the twentieth century in which notions such as otherness and nomadism took shape. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a major reassessment of a writer who, despite a readership that extends over much of the globe, remains poorly appreciated at home.

Reviews

Hassan Melehys groundbreaking study begins with a simple yet overlooked factKerouac, originally from the French-Canadian community of Lowell, Massachusetts, was a native Francophone speaker. The author reintroduces his readers to Kerouac as not only an astute reader and craftsman of literature, but also a transcultural author whose work explores tensions between roots and travel, settlement and motion, home and the road Melehys work is a timely and vital contribution not just to Beat Generation scholarship, but also to Francophone studies more broadly as the field tends toward inscribing Francophone Literatures in global and transnational paradigms. * LEsprit Crateur *
Kerouac: Language, Poetry, & Territory provides rich analysis, further evidenceif that is neededto show why this mid-century authors critical stock goes up even as I write Focused on Kerouacs French Canadian roots as key to understanding his literary achievement, Hassan Melehy assumes Kerouacs importance as a writer, and illuminates the role his French-Canadian bilingual background has on his art. * American Book Review *
As a professor of French and Francophone studies, Melehy (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) has an excellent perspective on Jack Kerouac (192269) as a Franco-American writer. Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the home of many immigrants from Quebec, including his parents, and he spoke French at home. Melehy illuminates the way this background influenced the writer's attitudes toward race, his love of world literature, and his transnational point of view. More important, Melehy discusses the influence of the grammar of the French language on the famous style of Kerouac's fiction. The author provides remarkable close readings of early novelsfor example, The Town and the City (1950), Dr. Sax (1959)in which Kerouac's Franco-American heritage is especially important. Melehy packs the book with insights, and these are expanded in the stimulating notes. Including a helpful bibliography and a thorough index, this study makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Kerouac's work and to American studies in general. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *
While some literary critics rescue Kerouac from the impulse to collapse textuality into biography by erasing Kerouacs cultural specificity, Melehy instead traces the impact of his French-Canadian background on a formal and a thematic level, finding in it a source of Kerouacs literary innovations. In its attention to Kerouacs cultural background, Melehys critical intervention joins the recent publication of Jack Kerouacs French writings ... to point to the fundamental importance of Kerouacs biculturalism to his literary project. ... An innovative exploration of Kerouacs poetics. * Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature *
Melehys Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory is an innovative exploration of Kerouacs poetics, exposing the importance of the specificity of Jack Kerouacs own French-Canadian cultural background to Kerouacs energetic reformation of American literature as North American, with suggestions for reaching a global scope(179-80). * Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature *
Melehy aims to revitalize our thinking on one of the most widely and enthusiastically read of twentieth-century American authors. Through excellent exposition, careful analysis, and valuable critical readings that draw on recent French notions of minority and nomadic writing, Melehy explores the role of the French language in Kerouacs life and work, bringing this important and fascinating topic to formal academic discussion * Jonathan Arac, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh, USA *
Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory argues persuasively that Kerouacs literariness is thoroughly sophisticated, and that his relationship to French and French Canada are at the root of this literary achievement. Melehys examination of Kerouacs countercultural poetics and the relationship of those poetics to social locations and dislocations will be of interest to both scholars and Kerouac aficionados. * Maria Damon, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies, Pratt Institute of Art, USA *
Hassan Melehy's Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a much-needed reassessment of Kerouac's work. Through a groundbreaking analysis of Kerouac's vexed relationship to his Qubcois ancestry and his experience of exile from his own history, Melehy provides a context in which many of the main features of Kerouac's writing come alive anew. Melehy shows why Kerouac is a central figure for a re-imagination of American literature that wouldfor the first timetake into account our multilingual and vagabond past. * Timothy Hampton, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, USA *

Author Bio

Hassan Melehy is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. He is the author of The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (2010) and Writing Cogito: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Institution of the Modern Subject (1997).