The research and creative portions of this thesis develop from the various responses individuals experience in the wake of a loss. The research into the evolution of faith in author Jack Kerouac's 'Duluoz Legend' and the central storyline of the novel 'Mayor of Hollywood' spring from the same well: the crossroads between death and faith. The research piece concerns itself with Kerouac's exploration of the spiritual interior in the wake of the death of his protagonist's older brother, developing a personal faith that blends Buddhism and Catholicism unfettered by formal religious practice, mirroring instead an older path of Catholic mysticism. Mayor of Hollywood explores the opposite side of the religious coin: the protagonist, Lucy Cassidy, has little compelling interest in her own spiritual existence but must address the practicalities of her partner's formal practice of Catholicism, including dietary restrictions, regular worship, moral strictures, and the religious formalization of the guilt process. At the same time, Lucy and Mark must resolve several deaths that have occurred, substituting the secular path of crime detection for the more spiritual quest to reunite with God. Linked by the shared topic of death, the two halves of the thesis address faith as a whole, exploring the interior and exterior spiritual life.

The present study affirms that Jack Kerouac's individual narratives of his Duluoz Legend, as contained in thirteen of his key novels, serve as episodic chapters in which the archetypal hero voyages on a quest through beatific discoveries toward a final self-discovery, a beatific vision.The first two chapters of the present study examine the archetypal relationship between the Beat novel and. beatific vision, studying this vision under four of its root-aspects: American transcendentalism, Catholic apocalyptic writing, Dionysian fulfillment, and Buddhistic unconsciousness. Chapters three, four and five turn from the philosophical patterns of the Duluoz Legend to the more specific plot patterns of these thirteen novels, an archetypal quest pattern which is simultaneously a lament for a lost Eden, an initiation rite, and a monomyth, the single pattern of the journey quest which underlies all myth.The final seven chapters develop the beatific aesthetic as it patterns the Duluoz Legend through the key novels of Kerouac in specific terms of myth and archetype. Chapter six examines the first stage of development, the world child, as embodied in Visions of Gerard (1922-1926), in which the memory of the life of the dead child Gerard, saintly and unspotted and wholly innocent, touches his narrator-brother, Jack Duluoz, the protagonist of the Duluoz Legend, who is beginning a new spiritual life, a new quest. The second (adolescent) stage of initiation, is presented in chapter seven as embodied in Dr. Sax (1930-1936), in which Jack Duluoz moves from eight to fourteen years of age, living in a world of imagination and fears, mixing fantasy and reality, finally unmasking the shadow of himself. Chapter eight considers two novels which deal with the third stage of the archetypal quest, where the protagonist rejects worldly power (flesh, knowledge, action) and makes a crucial discovery of the unknown within the self: Maggie Cassidy, Springtime Mary (1938-1939) and Vanity of Duluoz (1939-1946). Chapter nine examines the Kerouac novels which cover the scape-goat figure of Cody-Dean (Neal) and the resultant auest: events covered horizontally in On the Road (1946-1950) and vertically in Visions of Cody (1944-1952). The realization--that the American dream represented by Dean (teal) can have no validity in the present-brings Duluoz to his fifth period, his descent into hell, the night journey of his soul. Chapter ten analyzes the two Kerouac novels which trace the progress of this night journey: The Subterraneans (1953) and Tristessa (1955-1956). Having returned from hell, shaken and alone, the questing hero is then ready to ascend the mountain to achieve a union with the cycle of nature, in which the narrator withdraws within himself to discover a divinity there and emerge a more self-confident teacher, a Shaman. Chapter eleven treats Kerouac's two novels which explore this union of the individual with the cycle of nature: The Dharma Bums (1955-1956) and Desolation Angels (1956-1957). It is from an anticlimatic mood which follows the descent from the mountain that the quester moves into his final phase, the ultimate discovery of the unknown. Chapter twelve of the present study examines the three Kerouac novels which deal with this theme: Big Sur (1960), Satori in Paris (1965) and Vanity of Duluoz (1968).Chapter thirteen examines the vision for which the protagonist searches cyclically in these thirteen novels: ultimately, ironically, emptiness, the Void at the core of existence, the empty eye of God in which all dualities are resolved into nothingness. The dual recognition and recording of life energy in the moment--the sustaining of the monomyth-is all that remains of man's efforts to form his own art of life.

Cette étude s’attache à la figure de Jack Kerouac, liée de manière inédite à celle d’Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau par le truchement du thème de la pauvreté. Prenant ainsi le relais de la discussion sur la pauvreté amorcée par Gilles Marcotte, Jean Larose, Yvon Rivard et Yvan Lamonde, cette étude s’articule en deux étapes. Elle cherche d’abord, dans un premier chapitre, à identifier des échos entre les imaginaires de Garneau et de Kerouac. Elle montre aussi comment la pauvreté peut être à la fois vocation, aspiration et même posture chez chacun d’eux. Le deuxième chapitre, quant à lui, analyse l’héritage de la pauvreté de Kerouac, à l’aide de trois de ses romans : Visions of Gerard, On the Road et Satori in Paris. Enfin, ce mémoire met également en relief l’idée qu’il y a plusieurs liens à faire entre la littérature québécoise et Jack Kerouac, mais que ces liens dépassent une simple communauté de langue et tiennent plutôt à une réflexion autour de l’identité canadienne-française et d’un héritage culturel problématique commun / This study engages with Jack Kerouac’s figure, and links it to Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau’s in through the theme of poverty. Invoking theorizations of the term by Gilles Marcotte, Jean Larose, Yvon Rivard and Yvan Lamonde in relation to Québec writers, this thesis will comprise two parts. In the first chapter, this study highlights some dialogic interlinkings between Garneau’s and Kerouac’s imaginaries. The point is to explain how poverty can simultaneously be a vocation, an aspiration, and a posture (as in Jérôme Meizoz’s study) for each writer. The second chapter analyzes what Jack Kerouac’s poverty heritage entails through a discussion of three of his novels: Visions of Gerard, On the Road and Satori in Paris. Lastly, this study also highlights that they are many links to be made between Québec literature and Jack Kerouac, but that these links go beyond a linguistic community; rather, they have to do with a negotiation of both French-Canadian identity and a problematic shared cultural heritage.

That marginalized discourse communities practice differing modes of communication is a claim recently argued; critics have focused on the trope of metonymy as a means of signifying a discriminated-against group's silenced status within the mainstream society. What seems to be ignored in this discussion is how differing media--literature, music, painting--constitute texts that cut across discursive space (the site of these media) in a similar fashion. By positing the intertextuality (i.e., the similarity) of psycholinguistic metonymy and jazz phraseology, this thesis demonstrates how literary texts issuing from marginalized discourse communities can speak their subjectivities' full names. In Langston Hughes' "The Blues I'm Playing," metonymy and jazz serve as methods of analysis which show the subject-object relationship in artistic production. Jack Kerouac's On The Road constitutes a narrative subjectivity that, like jazz music, metonymically disrupts itself as silences speak from the realm of an Other. By accounting for the similarities between metonymy and jazz, this thesis asserts that more accurate readings can be derived from literature issuing from discourse communities which use jazz to signify. / Department of English

A finalidade deste estudo é analisar, do ponto de vista da Literatura Comparada, as relações existentes entre contos do escritor Caio Fernando Abreu e o romance On the Road, do norte-americano Jack Kerouac. Com o objetivo de apreender o diálogo entre os textos, a investigação desenvolve-se desde o exame do estilo de vida das personagens até as condições históricas nas quais foram produzidas as obras. Dessa forma, focaliza-se o local que ocupa a produção literária do escritor gaúcho, a partir das relações inter-literárias com a realidade cultural do seu tempo. Pretendeu-se verificar, através da Literatura Comparada, de que modo a obra de Caio absorve os influxos da obra de Kerouac. Assim, examina-se a apropriação cultural estrangeira através da recepção, em Caio, da literatura “beat”. O estudo aborda questões referentes ao sujeito, à liberdade, à introspecção, à fragmentação, à identidade, ao estranhamento, ao desejo, à autonomia, relacionando-as à construção da linguagem e à representação da visão de mundo dos autores. Para tanto, foram considerados alguns momentos históricos do final do século XX, como a Segunda Guerra Mundial, a Guerra Fria, o Macartismo e a ditadura militar brasileira. Nesse contexto, intensifica-se, de um lado, o desejo de livre arbítrio e, de outro, a imobilidade resultante da falta de esperança. A partir desses dados, analisa-se a atmosfera vivida e representada nas obras de Caio e Kerouac. Dessa forma, o trabalho desenvolve a hipótese de que Caio Fernando Abreu absorve aspectos da filosofia “beat”, assimila-os e os transforma para adaptá-los ao seu contexto histórico e cultural.

The general object of study of this work is the rise and effects of competing visions in the construction of the subjective personal American landscape in 20th century North American travel literature. The research and analysis done will follow the idea that there are different visions of America present at the same time in a given text-character. These visions, when affecting and transforming the travelling experience and, when contrasted to other’s visions and compared between them, may allow for the appropriation of the landscape through the creation of a personal, intimate and polyphonic image of the same. In order to grasp this final vision characters must undergo a process with three stages that resemble an empiric scientific experiment. Is on the exploration of this experimental dimension from where we start this study.

A finalidade deste estudo é analisar, do ponto de vista da Literatura Comparada, as relações existentes entre contos do escritor Caio Fernando Abreu e o romance On the Road, do norte-americano Jack Kerouac. Com o objetivo de apreender o diálogo entre os textos, a investigação desenvolve-se desde o exame do estilo de vida das personagens até as condições históricas nas quais foram produzidas as obras. Dessa forma, focaliza-se o local que ocupa a produção literária do escritor gaúcho, a partir das relações inter-literárias com a realidade cultural do seu tempo. Pretendeu-se verificar, através da Literatura Comparada, de que modo a obra de Caio absorve os influxos da obra de Kerouac. Assim, examina-se a apropriação cultural estrangeira através da recepção, em Caio, da literatura “beat”. O estudo aborda questões referentes ao sujeito, à liberdade, à introspecção, à fragmentação, à identidade, ao estranhamento, ao desejo, à autonomia, relacionando-as à construção da linguagem e à representação da visão de mundo dos autores. Para tanto, foram considerados alguns momentos históricos do final do século XX, como a Segunda Guerra Mundial, a Guerra Fria, o Macartismo e a ditadura militar brasileira. Nesse contexto, intensifica-se, de um lado, o desejo de livre arbítrio e, de outro, a imobilidade resultante da falta de esperança. A partir desses dados, analisa-se a atmosfera vivida e representada nas obras de Caio e Kerouac. Dessa forma, o trabalho desenvolve a hipótese de que Caio Fernando Abreu absorve aspectos da filosofia “beat”, assimila-os e os transforma para adaptá-los ao seu contexto histórico e cultural.

A finalidade deste estudo é analisar, do ponto de vista da Literatura Comparada, as relações existentes entre contos do escritor Caio Fernando Abreu e o romance On the Road, do norte-americano Jack Kerouac. Com o objetivo de apreender o diálogo entre os textos, a investigação desenvolve-se desde o exame do estilo de vida das personagens até as condições históricas nas quais foram produzidas as obras. Dessa forma, focaliza-se o local que ocupa a produção literária do escritor gaúcho, a partir das relações inter-literárias com a realidade cultural do seu tempo. Pretendeu-se verificar, através da Literatura Comparada, de que modo a obra de Caio absorve os influxos da obra de Kerouac. Assim, examina-se a apropriação cultural estrangeira através da recepção, em Caio, da literatura “beat”. O estudo aborda questões referentes ao sujeito, à liberdade, à introspecção, à fragmentação, à identidade, ao estranhamento, ao desejo, à autonomia, relacionando-as à construção da linguagem e à representação da visão de mundo dos autores. Para tanto, foram considerados alguns momentos históricos do final do século XX, como a Segunda Guerra Mundial, a Guerra Fria, o Macartismo e a ditadura militar brasileira. Nesse contexto, intensifica-se, de um lado, o desejo de livre arbítrio e, de outro, a imobilidade resultante da falta de esperança. A partir desses dados, analisa-se a atmosfera vivida e representada nas obras de Caio e Kerouac. Dessa forma, o trabalho desenvolve a hipótese de que Caio Fernando Abreu absorve aspectos da filosofia “beat”, assimila-os e os transforma para adaptá-los ao seu contexto histórico e cultural.

This thesis considers the theme of suffering and its resolution in the novels of Jack Kerouac, Leonard Cohen, and William Burroughs, three avant-garde contemporary writers. It discusses most of their work in a general way, with reference to the theme of suffering; and it also analyses in a much more detailed manner the Subterraneans by Kerouac, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers by Cohen, and Naked Lunch by Burroughs. Cohen envisions man as a suffering being who experiences his pain in many different ways. He criticizes the old ritual patterns in which suffering once took its form - the pattern of religion which teaches man that suffering is good, and History which teaches that the cycle of civilization operates only in terms of the torturer and his victim. He rejects, too, the contemporary form of pop art which ignores the fact that suffering is a very real and overwhelming part of man. Having lost the old ritual patterns of suffering, man feels alienated from his own personal pain. Through the magic of good art, Cohen feels, man can regain entrance to his own being, for by experiencing another's suffering in art, he can regain his own awareness of suffering. If we misinterpret or misuse our own pain, we become one of Cohen's 'losers,' for we lose the core of our being to false ritual. Cohen believes the ancient notion that suffering deepens character, and he argues that man, through an understanding of his own pain, becomes a richer and better person, more capable of recognizing the magic which exists along with pain. For magic does exist with pain, and in art we gain a momentary entrance into this world of magic. Through the investigation of self and the uniqueness of self, man comes to recognize the uniqueness and magic of all. The artist takes on the role of prophet visionary showing all men that "magic is afoot." Jack Kerouac suffered a different form of pain - a pain which originated in his desperate search for innocence. His Catholic heritage taught him that the world of mind and spirit could see God, while the physical body was the realm of the sinful and guilty. His life became a quest in search of an innocence in which man could, transcend his guilt and shame and become beatific. Kerouac named the entire beat generation beatific, but he could not evade his feeling of guilt and shame within his own life, and he fluctuated throughout life between ecstatic idealism and hopeless despair. His strong mother fixation was a major cause for the split between his sense of idealism and the life of the physical body - and his mother became associated in his mind with those aspects of consciousness he considered 'ideal.' Yet Kerouac also longed for freedom and individuality, realms of experience outside his mother's hold. He expressed his life within his art, showing his tension and anguish from the pull of these two forms of experience. Kerouac's final interpretation of suffering paralleled the Catholic vision, for art became, in his life, a means of personal confession and penance. William Burroughs' despair is expressed through fear and rage, and a figurative comparison with 'paranoia' defines the range of his suffering fairly closely. Burroughs fears persecution from society which controls man through his need, fearing especially the implosive and depersonalizing forces of society which threaten to degrade and annihilate man. Man's own body takes part in this social degradation, for it is man's body which succumbs to addictive need. Burroughs strives to preserve his sense of inner reality and freedom at all costs. He purges his own personal sense of fear through his art, and art becomes, in his use of it, a social act of exorcism. He shouts the unspeakable and becomes a priest in a cultural purification rite; he shows the absurdity of man's reality in the form of comedy and dream and these become the source of his release. He defends himself against social control by his ability to exaggerate the power of society to the point of the grotesque, and art becomes the written form of his protest. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Ce mémoire en recherche-création se décline en deux parties; un roman et un essai. Le roman et l'essai se répondent, en traitant tous les deux de la période des années 50, qui représente le contexte du roman On the Road qui sera analysé dans l'essai, mais aussi le moteur créatif qui a inspiré le roman Cuvée 44. Le roman, Cuvée 44, s'inspire de la filiation des romans de route et de quête personnelle dont On the Road est un des précurseurs. Il relate la vie mouvementée de Francine Boudreau, une jeune femme de quinze ans qui quitte son Québec natal en 1959 pour un monde de possibilités qui s'offrent à elle aux États-Unis, durant les années 50 et 60. Le lecteur est transporté un peu partout au pays, alors que la jeune femme tente de se poser quelque part. L'essai, quant à lui, traite de la réception de l'œuvre phare de Kerouac, On the Road, afin d'observer comment elle a évolué selon les décennies. En faisant ressortir les diverses critiques du roman de l'écrivain de la Beat Generation, on peut ainsi ressortir les différentes postures qui lui sont accordées au travers des époques, pour en voir les constantes et les disparités.