TY  - JOUR
T1  - From Kerouac back to Thoreau: The Pull towards Nature, a Revolt against Culture?
AU  - Harma, Tanguy
PY  - 2023
DA  - June
JF  - Journal of American Studies of Turkey
JO  - JAST
PB  - American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT)
WT  - DergiPark
SN  - 1300-6606
SP  - 53
EP  - 70
IS  - 57
LA  - en
AB  - Many of Jack Kerouac’s road novels stage a retreat into thewild that typifies an irrepressible urge towards natural phenomena, anurge which closely resonates with the works of Henry David Thoreaua century earlier. In Kerouac’s Big Sur (1962) and in Thoreau’s Walden(1854), nature is envisaged as a safe haven from the sociohistoricalforces of oppression that shape modern existence, but also – moreromantically – as a gateway to spiritual insights that affords thepossibility for transcendence. Highlighting a series of analogies on thenarrative, aesthetic and ontological planes between the two novels, thearticle goes on to show that this tropism towards nature simultaneouslyinvolves a process of disengagement from the cultural predicamentof modern America; for Thoreau this meant the industrial revolution,for Kerouac the post-war quagmire. Reinterpreted as a romantic formof the revolt, this paper argues that this disengagement promotes adeliberate alienation from the social world that blurs the line betweenthe quest for transcendence and the solipsistic condition.
KW  - Beat Literature
KW  - American Transcendentalism
KW  - American Romanticism
KW  - Disengagement
KW  - Alienation
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UR  - https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/jast/issue//1137481
L1  - https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/2513821
ER  -