Re-Inventing Traditions: Jack Kerouac and The Poetics Of Subversion
Re-Inventing Traditions: Jack Kerouac and The Poetics Of Subversion

Summary/Abstract: Questioning the nature and function of literature, the artists of the Beat Generation translate their experiences into a new code of poetics, and ultimately, of literature. Their quasi-scientific method of discovery through experimentation asks for the dissolution of the boundaries between subject and object, conscious and unconscious, description and explanation. The Beat confession is a complex strategy, a plea for forgiveness in the form of a public disclosure in order to regain acceptance into an imagined community. On the other hand, it is a defiant statement of self-assertiveness that opposes existing cultural conditions. Through poetics, Jack Kerouac gives a political turn to his literary involvement. Since a retreat from the public realm is a precarious way of making his presence felt, he imagines the writer as the one leading by example. Focusing on confessional modes of expression, he tries to establish a relationship between the self and society. His writing is supposed to be a copy of “exactly what it is” and consistent with this creed, Kerouac’s thinking and acting are modeled after the law of nature and its process of infinite transformation.

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