Jack Kerouac and the American Spectacle

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.

• 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? Kerouac’s Portrayals of Mexicans and African Americans - Kerouac’s 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: Kerouac’s 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 Messenger’s 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 - Kerouac’s 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