Harma, Tanguy. 2022. From Kerouac back to Thoreau: The Pull towards Nature, a Revolt against Culture? JAST – Journal of American Studies of Turkey(57), pp. 53-70. ISSN 1300-6606 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Many of Jack Kerouac's road novels stage a retreat into the wild that typifies an irrepressible urge towards natural phenomena, an urge which closely resonates with the works of Henry David Thoreau a century earlier. In Kerouac's Big Sur (1962) and in Thoreau's Walden (1854), nature is envisaged as a safe haven from the sociohistorical forces of oppression that shape modern existence, but also – more romantically – as a gateway to spiritual insights that affords the possibility for transcendence. Highlighting a series of analogies on the narrative, aesthetic and ontological planes between the two novels, the article goes on to show that this tropism towards nature simultaneously involves a process of disengagement from the cultural predicament of modern America; for Thoreau this meant the industrial revolution, for Kerouac the post-war quagmire. Reinterpreted as a romantic form of the revolt, I argue that this disengagement promotes a deliberate alienation from the social world that blurs the line between the quest for transcendence and the solipsistic condition.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Beat Literature; American Transcendentalism; American Romanticism; Disengagement; Alienation
Related URLs:	Publisher
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	English and Comparative Literature
Dates:	Date Event 1 March 2022 Accepted 30 May 2022 Published
Item ID:	33014
Date Deposited:	09 Jan 2023 10:24
Last Modified:	10 Jan 2023 12:32
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33014

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