par Bellarsi, Franca 
Référence The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac, Cambridge University Press, page (240-255)
Publication Publié, 2024-01
Référence The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac, Cambridge University Press, page (240-255)
Publication Publié, 2024-01
Partie d'ouvrage collectif
| Résumé : | This chapter begins by scrutinizing The Dharma Bums through the lens of the Romantic/Transcendentalist models that inspired the novel’s re-enchantment of nonhuman material creation. A second part turns to Kerouac’s haiku and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity to show how the concept of Buddhist “Emptiness” considerably enriches his Romantic/Transcendentalist sense of “field-being.” This section argues that the embeddedness of the human mind in the nonhuman combined with a serene acceptance of the latter’s elusiveness actually constitutes one of Kerouac’s important, if paradoxical, contributions to an understanding of the web of environmental continuities. By contrast, the third part moves from Kerouac’s ecospiritual holism to his deep-seated ecophobia: as found in “Desolation Journal,” Desolation Angels, and “Desolation Blues.” A fourth anddiscusses how, despite his environmental angst, Kerouac nevertheless experiments considerably at the level of ecopoetics, probing into a wildness of form that compensates, on the one hand, for the fear that untamed nature instills in his fiction and poetry, and on the other, for the limited presence of any wilderness in his city-inspired texts. |
