The Unhappiness Muse

Chapter 6 provides an examination of findings related to the frequency of loss in the lives of artists, and how artists are motivated to shape loss and inner pain into creative products. Loss has been noted in the lives of artists for decades. It comes in the form of death; it comes in other ways, too. The chapter explores questions about the loss–art connection. What is it about loss that mobilizes creativity? What’s the nature of the correlation? Does loss propel art? The author outlines the role of trauma in creativity, with artist examples including Jorge Luis Borges, William Styron, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, and Patricia Highsmith.

Chaos Rainbows

Chapter 4 provides an examination of the common states of mind arising out of openness, including schizotypy, reduced latent inhibition, and cognitive disinhibition. The chapter reconstructs a frame of mind artists themselves have a hard time describing. From there, questions center on the shaping, the organizing, and the ordering involved in art-making. Most of the chapter is dedicated to chaos and its roots in personality. But chaos alone isn’t enough. Creativity is making something. Chaos is a means to that end, the making. How the artist uses chaos is just as important as finding ways to stay open to it. Numerous artists are used as illustrations, including Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Jobs, and Joni Mitchell. A four-step model for how raw materials get shaped into art is also presented.

INTERLIGAÇÕES GEOPOÉTICAS ENTRE SIMÕES LOPES NETO E JACK KEROUAC

O presente artigo apresenta as interligações entre dois contos regionalistas de grande destaque a partir da linguagem desenvolvida em ambos, conhecida como geopoética, responsável por expressar através de descrições do ambiente seu sentimento de admiração e pertencimento ao lugar onde vivem. Os referidos contos são "Trezentas onças", de Simões Lopes Neto e "Sozinho no topo da montanha", de Jack Kerouac, que apesar de haverem sido publicados em contextos e épocas distantes, possuem similaridades muito significativas no que tange à poética da terra. A partir de referenciais teóricos como Milton Santos e Regina Zilberman, é primeiro esclarecido os conceitos de ambiente e espaço e a relação com o ser humano, observando como a literatura gaúcha e Beatnik vem incorporando a imagética ao longo da sua história. As interligações aqui analisadas entre os contos mostram que a geopoética aproxima as obras por trazerem a natureza e o homem como figuras centrais que dialogam seus papéis e difundem sua expressão pela literatura.

Adaptação em on the road: fendas abertas na realidade

O artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre a genealogia do ato de adaptação, considerando teorias do cinema e da literatura numa construção conduzida pela produção de subjetividades e sensações. Utilizamos como objeto de análise o livro On the road - Pé na estrada, de Jack Kerouac, publicado pela primeira vez em 1957, e o filme homônimo de Walter Salles, lançado em 2012. Trazemos a problemática do termo “adaptação”, tal como a questão da tradução, considerada recriação ou transcriação em relação à obra de origem.

Teaching the Road Novel with Jack Kerouac

This essay presents multi-racial/ethnic/gendered responses to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, illustrating how cultural experiences of Beat and Chicano/a gendered identity shape one’s understanding of material and imaginary spaces. In addition to On the Road, the essay discusses Hunter S. Thompsons’ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing, Maria Amparo Escandon’s Gonzales & Daughter Trucking Co.: A Road Novel with Literary License, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Teaching Jack Kerouac in a Decolonizing South African 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.

R. Crumb

Robert Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self is the first monograph to explore the intersection between Crumb’s love of literature, his search for the meaning of life and the ways he connects his own autobiography with the themes of the writers he has admired. Crumb’s comics from the beginning reflected the fact that he was a voracious reader from childhood and perused a variety of authors including Charles Dickens, J.D. Salinger, and, during his adolescence, Beat writers like Jack Kerouac. He was profoundly influenced by music, especially the blues, and the ecstatic power of music appears in his artwork throughout his career. The first chapter explores the ways Robert Crumb illustrates works by William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Charles Bukowski. The book continues with individual chapters devoted to Crumb’s illustrations of biographies of blues musicians Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton; Philip K. Dick; Jean-Paul Sartre; Franz Kafka; and concludes with an exploration of Crumb’s illustrations to the book of Genesis. In all his drawings accompanying literary texts, Crumb returns to a number of key themes regarding his personal spiritual quest such as suffering and existential solitude; the search for romantic and sexual love; the impact of entheogens such as LSD on his quest for answers to his cosmic questions. We discover that Crumb gradually embraces a mysticism rooted in his studies of Gnosticism. In the final chapter on the book of Genesis, readers may observe the ways Crumb continues his critique of monotheistic religion in a variety of subtle ways. Robert Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self concludes with an Epilogue which discusses Crumb’s present-day life in France and the ways he has continued to engage with spiritual and philosophical themes in his later work.

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

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.