scholarly journals The Real America: Representation of American Society in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Based on Michel Foucault’s Notions of Institutions, Normalization, and Surveillance

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iraj Soleymanjahan ◽  
Nasser Maleki ◽  
Hiwa Weisi
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Government ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
On The Road ◽  
American Society ◽  
Fitting In

This study aimed to scrutinize and analyze the novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac in the light of the political theory of Michel Foucault. The focus, however, would be specifically on the concepts of normalization, institutions and surveillance put forward in his book Discipline and Punish (1995), coupled with some other works that wrestle with the close links of power, society, and institutions. This research seeked to describe the real America in the 1950s, a decade that witnessed both conformism and radicality, represented in the novel. The study pointed out that the novel was a depiction of the American society in the 1950s in which distinct, overlapping institutions did a great deal in restricting the freedom of individuals who seeked liberation and authenticity. The American government draws on the power of the law, police, prison, academia, family, and different other overlapping and satellite institutions, working hand in hand to create a matrix. The concept of matrix, therefore, highlights the nexus through which the normalization and conformity of the individuals are guaranteed, leading to the creation of perfect institutionalized men who are reduced to the level of simpletons. The whole novel becomes the story of some men who advocate abnormality as their credo to live a free life. Quite the contrary, they are transitioned into meek and docile bodies whose identity hinges on being like others in fitting in and following the norms through different dominant fragmenting institutions.

Roads

Site Reading ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 73-95
Author(s):  
David J. Alworth
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Tom Wolfe ◽  
Joan Didion ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Social ◽  
Road Narrative ◽  
On The Road

This chapter focuses Jack Kerouac and Joan Didion, arguing that the postwar American road narrative produces a sophisticated account of the nonhuman social actor through its treatment of the automobile, an entity that is both a material thing and a social site. In Kerouac's On the Road, a semiautobiographical account of his road trips in the late 1940s, the car plays no less potent a role in facilitating male bonding and in constituting the social world of the novel. To capture the distinctiveness of that world, the chapter contrasts it with the representation of two other automotive subcultures—the hot-rodders and the Merry Pranksters—in seminal works by Tom Wolfe that appeared in the wake of On the Road. Then, the chapter turns to the writing of Joan Didion, arguing that Play It as It Lays functions as a self-conscious response both to Kerouac's novel and to the mythology of road-tripping that it fostered.

scholarly journals “[A]n Exterior Air of Pilgrimage”: The Resilience of Pilgrimage Ecopoetics and Slow Travel from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Susan Signe Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Canterbury Tales ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Structural Elements ◽  
The Road ◽  
Travel Diary ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Canterbury Tales

While the Beats can be seen as critical actors in the environmental humanities, their works should be seen over the longue durée. They are not only an origin, but are also recipients, of an environmentally aware tradition. With Geoffrey Chaucer and Jack Kerouac, we see how a contemporary American icon functions as a text parallel to something generally seen as discrete and past, an instance of the modern embracing, interpreting, and appropriating the medieval. I argue that The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer influenced Kerouac’s shaping of On the Road. In the unpublished autograph manuscript travel diary dating from 1948–1949 (On the Road notebook), Kerouac imagines the novel as a quest tale, thinking of pilgrimage during its gestation. Further, Kerouac explicitly cites Chaucer. His novel can be seen not only in the tradition of Chaucer, but can bring out aspects of pilgrimage ecopoetics in general. These connections include structural elements, the spiritual development of the narrator, reliance on vernacular dialect, acute environmental awareness, and slow travel. Chaucer’s influence on Kerouac highlights how certain elements characteristic of pilgrimage literature persist well into the modern period, in a resilience of form, language, and ecological sensibility.

Jack Kerouac and Translingual Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hassan Melehy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New England ◽  
American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
French Canadian ◽  
The Road ◽  
Indian War ◽  
On The Road

Known primarily as the author of On the Road (1957), the novel most closely associated with the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) also wrote extensively about his French-Canadian heritage. A native of the large francophone community of Lowell, Massachusetts, he faced the dilemma of writing in a foreign language, English, while one of his motives to write was to memorialize a community assimilating to U.S. society and speaking French less and less. The recent publication of his two short novels in French from the early 1950s, La nuit est ma femme (The Night Is My Woman) and Sur le chemin (Old Bull in the Bowery), provides evidence that the preoccupation with travel informing On the Road is deeply tied to his sense of cultural and linguistic exile. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Quebec to New England in the 19th and early 20th centuries practiced survivance, cultural survival, especially through maintaining fluency in French and adhering to Catholicism while living among a Protestant majority. These customs of the Quebecois diaspora had begun in Canada: following the 1763 annexation of Lower Canada to Britain at the end of the French and Indian War, francophones resisted immense pressure to assimilate, both official and unofficial. Narratives of displacement from France and subsequently Quebec persisted in folklore and literature on both sides of the border through the 20th century. In early 1951, Kerouac drafted La nuit est ma femme, telling the story of Michel Bretagne, a French Canadian from New England who wanders around the eastern United States with a sense of homelessness. Narrating in a French that reproduces the southern New England dialect, Michel laments that neither of the languages he speaks really belongs to him. The text develops the theme of cultural and linguistic mixing and its discovery through travel. Shortly after completing La nuit est ma femme, Kerouac brought this theme to On the Road, famously composing the novel on a roll of paper in three weeks in April 1951. Contrary to legend, he did extensive rewriting before his landmark work was published: Sur le chemin, which he drafted in late 1952, offers an “on the road” story about Franco-Americans and was by his own account a key part of the rewriting process. During this time, he elaborated his theory of “spontaneous prose,” writing quickly and in an improvisational manner as a way of conveying geographic, cultural, and linguistic movement. In the wake of On the Road’s depictions of the expanses of the United States, including its geographic place in North America, Kerouac turned to Franco-American New England. His next book, Dr. Sax (1959), takes place in Lowell and features lengthy passages in French; the novel’s central concerns are his community’s relationship to a legacy of displacement and the conflict between clinging to the past and creating something new. If there is a principal thrust in Kerouac’s writing, it is to challenge American literature to recognize its transnational and translingual character.

Bohemians, Vagabonds, and Wanderers of the “Ragged Promised Land” in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (58) ◽  
pp. 50-59
Author(s):  
Daria Anna Urbańska
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Real ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
The Road ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
On The Road ◽  
American Society ◽  
Main Protagonist

The article focuses on the journey into the “ragged promised land” (80) in On the Road. It can be seen as an escape of the main protagonist Sal Paradise from his roots and from the conformity of American society. Kerouac, having a Franco-Canadian heritage, presents a marginal possibility of heterogeneity in a homogenous postwar America. The author depicts additional mentors and heroes met along the way. They are, among others, tramps and hoboes, ragged wanderers and the Fellahin of Mexico, as well as Sal’s travel companion Dean Moriarty. Sal experiences something true and meaningful among those living on the margin of society. He travels considerable distances: from coast to coast across the United States, from boarder to boarder and to Mexico. The real journey, though, is inward, a passage through the wilderness of the self, the true “ragged promised land”.

Teaching Jack Kerouac in a Decolonizing South African University

2021 ◽  
pp. 269-278
Author(s):  
Eric Strand
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
White Male ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Student Newspaper ◽  
Reader Responses ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Eric Strand addresses his experiences as a white, male American professor teaching Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at the University of Cape Town in South Africa during the Rhodes Must Fall student movement, c 2015. Integrating excerpts from student essays in his classes and from the univeristy’s student newspaper, the essay reveals complex racial, gender, and class-based interpretations of the novel, all advising against narrow and stereotypic predications of reader responses to the novel.

U.S.-Israeli Policies: Reading the Signs for '77

Worldview ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (9) ◽  
pp. 4-9
Author(s):  
Mark A. Bruzonsky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Near East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Issue ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
Democratic Candidate ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Sense Of Urgency

The real crunch for Israel will probably come during 1977 if Ford is elected—it will be delayed by only a few months if a Democratic candidate wins.” So writes Wolf Blitzer, editor of the “Jewish lobby's” Washington publication Near East Report, in a recent issue of the Jerusalem Post.With the same sense of urgency Abba Eban insists that “Time is of the essence, and unhappily for us, time is running out. We ought to grasp the central issues now and involve the United States in resolving them.” He and a growing number of his colleagues fear that should Israel not choose to “cooperate” with the U.S., the Americans might run right over Israel on the road to Geneva and some form of imposed settlement.

scholarly journals Automatic Detection and Classification of Road, Car, and Pedestrian Using Binocular Cameras in Traffic Scenes with a Common Framework

Complexity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Yongchao Song ◽  
Jieru Yao ◽  
Yongfeng Ju ◽  
Yahong Jiang ◽  
Kai Du
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Pedestrian Detection ◽  
Minimum Energy ◽  
Automatic Detection ◽  
Initial Contour ◽  
Target Area ◽  
Threshold Method ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road

In order to solve the problems of traffic object detection, fuzzification, and simplification in real traffic environment, an automatic detection and classification algorithm for roads, vehicles, and pedestrians with multiple traffic objects under the same framework is proposed. We construct the final V view through a considerate U-V view method, which determines the location of the horizon and the initial contour of the road. Road detection results are obtained through error label reclassification, omitting point reassignment, and so an. We propose a peripheral envelope algorithm to determine sources of vehicles and pedestrians on the road. The initial segmentation results are determined by the regional growth of the source point through the minimum neighbor similarity algorithm. Vehicle detection results on the road are confirmed by combining disparity and color energy minimum algorithms with the object window aspect ratio threshold method. A method of multifeature fusion is presented to obtain the pedestrian target area, and the pedestrian detection results on the road are accurately segmented by combining the disparity neighbor similarity and the minimum energy algorithm. The algorithm is tested in three datasets of Enpeda, KITTI, and Daimler; then, the corresponding results prove the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approach. Meanwhile, the real-time analysis of the algorithm is performed, and the average time efficiency is 13 pfs, which can realize the real-time performance of the detection process.

scholarly journals Road Extraction from High-Resolution SAR Images via Automatic Local Detecting and Human-Guided Global Tracking

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianghua Cheng ◽  
Wenxia Ding ◽  
Xishu Ku ◽  
Jixiang Sun
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Sar Images ◽  
The Road ◽  
Global Tracking ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Airborne Sar ◽  
Fitting In ◽  
Searching Method ◽  
Local Detection ◽  
Local Road

Because of existence of various kinds of disturbances, layover effects, and shadowing, it is difficult to extract road from high-resolution SAR images. A new road center-point searching method is proposed by two alternant steps: local detection and global tracking. In local detection step, double window model is set, which consists of the outer fixed square window and the inner rotary rectangular one. The outer window is used to obtain the local road direction by using orientation histogram, based on the fact that the surrounding objects always range along with roads. The inner window rotates its orientation in accordance with the result of local road direction calculation and searches the center points of a road segment. In global tracking step, particle filter of variable-step is used to deal with the problem of tracking frequently broken by shelters along the roadside and obstacles on the road. Finally, the center-points are linked by quadratic curve fitting. In 1 m high-resolution airborne SAR image experiment, the results show that this method is effective.

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