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Zusatztext 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 Québécois 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 would—for the first time—take into account our multilingual and vagabond past. Informationen zum Autor 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). Vorwort A reassessment of Jack Kerouac’s poetic theory and practice from the perspective of their central yet most overlooked component: the fact that he thought and worked in two languages, his native French and his adopted English. Zusammenfassung Given Jack Kerouac’s 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 Québec 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 Kerouac’s poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a naïve pursuit, Kerouac’s 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: Kerouac, Exile, and the Force of Literature1. Unsettlements2. On and Off the Franco-American Road3. Writing in Real Time4. Movements of Return5. The Roots of AbandonmentConclusion: Transnational American LiteraturesBibliographyIndex...
