This book explores the search for authenticity in the work of Jack Kerouac in the context of postwar American capitalism and the rise of the spectacle as a dominant mode of social mediation. It examines how Kerouacs experimental prose, spiritual inquiry, and relational aesthetics function as strategies of resistance to cultural homogenization, existential alienation, and hyper-individualism. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, media theory, cognitive and evolutionary science, and narratology, the study traces how Kerouac reimagines American identity through encounters with the Other, esoteric forms of knowledge, and intersubjective experience. Combining close textual analysis with a broad interdisciplinary lens, it considers how Kerouacs liminal positionas both insider and outsiderenables a unique literary response to the anxieties of his time. By placing Kerouac in dialogue with thinkers such as Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and C. G. Jung, this book sheds new light on the aesthetic, philosophical, and political dimensions of his work.
CONTENTS - LIST OF FIGURES - ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
-NOTES FOR THE READER INTRODUCTION
Chapter One. The Road to Authenticity:
Kerouac, Liminality, and the Spectacle of Postwar America - Between Dharma
and Debord: The Limits of Rebellion - Neither Here nor There: Liminal
Identity and the Beats Search for Meaning - Kerouac and the Implosion of the
Beats Conclusion - PART I. KEROUAC AND THE MAKING OF POSTWAR SELFHOOD -
Chapter Two. Synthetic Worlds, Ancestral Minds: Hyper-Stimulation and
Alienation in Kerouac - Out of Sync: Alienation and the Mismatch Hypothesis -
Homo Magis Realis and the Rise of Networked Creatures - Misfired Alarms:
Artificial Hazards in Big Sur - Conclusion
Chapter Three. Kerouac and the
Other: Race, Mysticism, and the Crisis of White Identity - Cultural
Appropriation or Mystical Idealization? Kerouacs Portrayals of Mexicans and
African Americans - Kerouacs Anarcho-Primitivism: The Politics of the Other
- Narrating the Sacred: Mediation and the Making of the Other in Tristessa
Conclusion
Chapter Four. The New Americanness: Scripts, Selves, and the
Beat Ethos - "The Vanishing American Hobo" and the Spectacle of Deterrence -
Other Ways of Being: Kerouacs Resistance to Ready-Made Lives - Out of Step
with Ourselves: Evolutionary Breakdown in the Spectacle - Inventing the
Beatnik: Alternative Identities in "New York Scenes" - Conclusion - PART II.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE REAL: TRANSCENDENCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Chapter Five.
Fragments of the Real: The Body, the Vision, and the Vanishing God - Sacred
Flesh, Profane Soul: The Feminine and the Logic of Dichotomy - Fractures in
the Fabric of Reality - The Weight of Nothingness: Nihilism, Guilt, and the
Void Within Conclusion
Chapter Six. Toward the Real: Transcendence,
Timelessness, and the Void - On Authenticity and the Weight of Freedom - On
Timelessness: Death, Being, and the Cosmic Real Conclusion
Chapter Seven.
Between Mysticism and Madness: Language, Gnosis, and the Limits of Knowing -
On Mystical Knowing: Intuition, Gnosis, and the Limits of Reason - The
Messengers Dilemma: Transmitting the Ineffable - Words from the Edge of the
Real Conclusion - PART III. THE INTERSUBJECTIVE REAL
Chapter Eight. The
Self in Dialogue: Narratives of Intimacy and Interpretive Desire - Kerouac
and the Relational Ground of the Self - Kerouacs Poetics of Male Intimacy:
The Aesthetics and Limits of Brotherhood - The Confessional Mode: Race,
Desire, and Distributed Perception - Unclear Signals, Unreadable Minds:
Interpreting Intention in the Legend Conclusion
Chapter Nine. Forms of
Presence: Improvisation, Empathy, and Orality in the Legend - Improvisation
and the Real - Second Chances for Empathy: Sketching the Missed Encounter -
Orality and the Real Conclusion - Final Reflections: Kerouac, the
Spectacle, and the Real - Bibliography
Talal Hochard is Assistant Professor of American literature at the University of Réunion Island. He holds a joint PhD in U.S. literature from the University of Lorraine and Masaryk University. His research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. literature and forms of literary and media resistance within the culture industry.
