Items related to Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form
Synopsis
This book traces Jack Kerouac's 'wild form' within an experimental continuum across the arts.""Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form"" connects the personal and creative development of the Beat generation's famous icon with cultural changes in postwar America. Michael Hrebeniak asserts that Jack Kerouac's 'wild form' - self-organizing narratives free of literary, grammatical, and syntactical conventions - moves within an experimental continuum across the arts to generate a Dionysian sense of writing as raw process. ""Action Writing"" highlights how Kerouac made concrete his 1952 intimation of 'something beyond the novel' by assembling ideas from Beat America, modernist poetics, action painting, bebop, and subterranean oral traditions.Geared to scholars and students of American literature, Beat studies, and creative writing, ""Action Writing"" places Kerouac's writing within the context of the American art scene at midcentury. Reframing the work of Kerouac and the Beat generation within the experimental modernist and postmodernist literary tradition, this probing inquiry offers a direct engagement with the social and cultural history at the foreground of Kerouac's career from the 1940s to the late 1960s.
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Review
"Michael Hrebeniak's work is indeed rare, bringing Jack Kerouac's work into the realm of Western aesthetics, a global arena in which to situate his considerable accomplishment. I don't know of another scholarly work that goes as far to ground Kerouac's Legend of Duluoz in such a wide and deep knowledge of world literatures."
" Michael Hrebeniak has written an exceptional book on Jack Kerouac, a book that melds criticism, narrative, and polemic into an entirely new alloy. It' s strange, alive, angry, and yet controlled ... a magnificent book." -- Robert Macfarlane, author of "Mountains of the Mind"
" Michael Hrebeniak' s work is indeed rare, bringing Jack Kerouac' s work into the realm of Western aesthetics, a global arena in which to situate his considerable accomplishment. I don' t know of another scholarly work that goes as far to ground Kerouac' s Legend of Duluoz in such a wide and deep knowledge of world literatures." -- Regina Weinreich, author of "The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac"
" Michael Hrebeniak has opened up serious issues that are always overlooked-- propaganda, Marcuse, Olson' s "Human Universe," for starters. Hrebeniak' s assessment that ' Kerouac' s swirling meditation on memory and recirculation of events' is a beautiful portal swinging wide. A complete success. Many are waiting to read a work on Jack that will put a modern foundation under the old dharma shack." -- Michael McClure, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright
"Michael Hrebeniak's work is indeed rare, bringing Jack Kerouac's work into the realm of Western aesthetics, a global arena in which to situate his considerable accomplishment. I don't know of another scholarly work that goes as far to ground Kerouac's Legend of Duluoz in such a wide and deep knowledge of world literatures."--Regina Weinreich, author of "The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac"
"Michael Hrebeniak has opened up serious issues that are always overlooked--propaganda, Marcuse, Olson's "Human Universe," for starters. Hrebeniak's assessment that 'Kerouac's swirling meditation on memory and recirculation of events' is a beautiful portal swinging wide. A complete success. Many are waiting to read a work on Jack that will put a modern foundation under the old dharma shack."--Michael McClure, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright
"In Michael Hrebeniak's" Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form," we at last have a full-length study of Kerouac that does justice to the depth of his intellect and the significance of his formal innovations."--"The Beat Review" "Michael Hrebeniak has opened up serious issues that are always overlooked--propaganda, Marcuse, Olson's Human Universe, for starters. Hrebeniak's assessment of Kerouac's work as a 'swirling meditation on memory and recirculation of events' is a beautiful portal swinging wide. A complete success."--Michael McClure, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright
Action Writing should appeal to scholars of postwar American and international literature and to those particularly interested in Kerouac's style. The book is an unusual but effective study-part biography, part literary analysis, part cultural critique-encompassing a variety of literary, aesthetic, and cultural sources. Literary sources include Keroauc's work, particularly his letters, On The Road, and Visions of Cody, as well as writers who influenced Kerouac (Wolfe, Miller, Celine) and whom Hrebeniak associates with Kerouac's work due to analogous philosophical ideas (Charles Olson, Michael McClure). For aesthetic sources, Hrebeniak focuses on two nonverbal wellsprings of Kerouac's inspiration: jazz (especially Charlie Parker) and modern painting (especially Jackson Pollock). These heterogeneous sources indicate both a conscious and direct as well subconscious or associative connection to Kerouac's work. Given that Kerouac's work "is born of a transdisciplinary poetics" (2), it makes sense that the sources in Action Writing are transdisciplinary as well. Hrebeniak posits Kerouac's "wild" form as "a prolongation of ecstasy to counteract the enervation of sanctioned narratives" (50). He views Kerouac's subversive desire to topple convention-i.e., literary prescriptions and cultural oppression-as Dionysian. Action or "orgiastic" (49) writing is about the eradication of "disciplinary borders and cliques . . . in the push to access the widest range of experience possible" (234). Hrebeniak regards Neal Cassady as the ascendant Dionysian archetype or force in Kerouac's fiction. His analysis of On The Road in particular achieves a fascinating blend of archetypal and cultural criticism.Hrebeniak sees jazz in the same essential Dionysian terms as it influenced Kerouac's style: "A progressive quest for freedom marks every point of renewal in jazz, a crusade to increase the capacity for expression" (198). But the flip side is Dionysian excess, destruction, and loss or waste. Hrebeniak fittingly explores the negative side in the binary manifestation of Dionysius as both creator and destroyer: "Kerouac's ambivalence [in On The Road] toward mythic America, a sequence of optimism and defeat that eventually settles on withdrawal" (125). Both the positive and the negative aspects of the Dionysian pattern are woven into not only Kerouac's characterization and narratives but also into the author's life and poetics as well. Action Writing offers an engaging analysis and perspicacious exploration of Kerouac's works, style, and literary art. Examinations of the historical context are generally informed, but occasionally Hrebeniak demonstrates a tendency to simplify in reductive terms. For example, when it comes to politics, he assumes that a government (or State) is a singular entity rather than a complex conglomeration of conflicting cultures, sub-cultures, and interests. In Gramscian discourse, a government or State is in reality not so much a collective unity as a competitive, contradictory battleground. But like Regina Weinrich's pioneering Kerouac's Spontaneous Poetics (1987), Hrebeniak's book makes a compelling argument to rescue Kerouac from the margin, where he is often dismissed as merely a "popular" writer-or simply understood as a (perhaps the) seminal figure in the Beat movement-claiming instead that he should be regarded as a major writer of international stature. Likeits subject and hero, Action Writing is inconsistently profound, but it manages to beautifully capture and analyze the genius, madness, accomplishment, naivety, disillusionment, displacement, failure, bitterness, magnetism, and energy-"He's got it, see?"-that is Kerouac. Action Writing examines the desire for Dionysian generation at the root of Kerouac's fiction-of destroying or supplanting the tried and worn in order to explore new terra incognita. This same desire also lies at the root of Hrebeniak's articulate and substantive study. Kerouac's fiction proved to be trailblazing, and Hrebeniak's study proves no less trailblazing for Kerouac scholarship. -- Keith Cavedo "T he Comparatist" (06/20/2008)
"Michael Hrebeniak has written an exceptional book on Jack Kerouac, a book that melds criticism, narrative, and polemic into an entirely new alloy. It's strange, alive, angry, and yet controlled . . . a magnificent book." --Robert Macfarlane, author of" Mountains of the Mind "
"Michael Hrebeniak's work is indeed rare. I don't know of another scholarly work that goes as far to ground Kerouac's Legend of Duluoz in such a wide and deep knowl- edge of world literatures."--Regina Weinreich, author of "The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac " "What is so exciting about Hrebeniak's book is how it places Kerouac and his work firmly within the avant-garde literary, artistic, and musical movements of the twentieth century."--"Beat Scene "
About the Author
Michael Hrebeniak teaches at Cranfield and Cambridge universities and is the associate producer of Optic Nerve, an independent film company based in London. His articles have appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, and the Times Literary Supplement. He is also the editor of Radical Poetics.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherSouthern Illinois University Pr
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 0809328674
- ISBN 13 9780809328673
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages320
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