Failed Faustians : Jack Kerouac and the Discourse of Delinquincy

Failed Faustians : Jack Kerouac and the Discourse of Delinquincy

Essay considering the relationship of middle twentieth-century delinquency and poverty with the explorations of class and culture that take place in the literature of Jack Kerouac. How actors in the Beat Movement, especially Kerouac, interrogated dominant American class structures of the 1950s; how Kerouac's novels helped to define the cultural and geographic space where "subsequent social thinkers would locate the poor" (125). Discussion of "anomic" and "psychopathological" delinquencies of minority and overburdened youth. The peculiar space that Kerouac's characters inhabit between "working-class roots and middle-class ambitions" (132). Criticism on Kerouac's "On the Road," "Maggie Cassidy," "Vanity of Duluoz," and "Dr. Sax: Faust Part III." Kerouac's vision of impoverishment seen as prefiguration of 1950s and 1980s American government social policy's model of the poor.

Schryer, Stephen

2011 Spring

English

Journal Article

1645443, 31871426

20th century, United States

10.1353/mfs.2011.0016

1080-658X (online), 0026-7724 (print)

1

123-148

Modern Fiction Studies (MFS)

57