Cloutier, Jean-Christophe
Description
"In many ways, Jack Kerouac the mythic "King of the Beats" forever hitchhiking on the road, has become synonymous with a romanticized view of the post
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war, capital "A" American writer. In fact, Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kérouac to immigrant parents from Québec, who were part of an unprecedented exodus that brought close to a million French Canadians south into the United States. Throughout his career, Kerouac not only secretly composed French manuscripts but also served as a self-translator for the majority of his writing career. As he describes in his bilingual journals, Kerouac endured the wound of assimilation and the source of his lifelong melancholy: the impossibility of living in French in the United States. In "Big American Writer": Jack Kerouac, Bilingualism, and the Archive, Jean-Christophe Cloutier repositions Kerouac in his actual geopolitical and cultural-linguistic reality as a minoritarian, bilingual, and bi-cultural author. Cloutier maintains that Kerouac's French-Canadian upbringing and bilingualism are formative to his breakthrough achievements as a new kind of North American writer. In viewing Kerouac's career in this way, Cloutier not only reconsiders Kerouac's legacy but calls for hemispheric American literary studies to encompass the North. Kerouac's writing provides a model for a continental approach and a new kind of literary landscape that transcends the boundaries of nations and embraces the polyphonic. Cloutier underscores how Kerouac's manuscripts open the possibility of new multilingual and ethnic kinship across the Americas as it presents a new way to understand this canonical but occasionally misunderstood writer"-- Provided by publisher.
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