The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration
This book by Edward Hirsch verbalizes the crisis of creativity. Both writers and thinkers have confronted the question of where inspiration comes from. The Greeks had the muses, the gospel writers were the vessels of God’s literal word, Rimbaud had hashish, Fitzgerald and Hemingway had bootlegged liquor, and Jack Kerouac and the rest of the beat generation had whatever drug was within arms reach. Inspiration takes many forms but a universal endeavor is originality. Throughout the ages, alternative thinking has often been the product of altered states of consciousness artificially accomplished with the faculty of drinking and drugs. Hirsch considers the relationship between drugs and “duende,” or the quality of passion and inspiration. Duende also literally translates to spirits; alcoholic drinks also fatefully being called spirits.
Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking.
This text prefaces most of my research topic’s research going forward. By Major Knepper’s recommendation, this source will be used to provide a basic foundation for my audience to understand the history of substance abuse, particularly alcohol, in literature. This text explains the relationship between alcohol and authors. Lewis Hyde adds to the discourse on the language surrounding alcohol illustrating how words like spirits and demons both romanticize and perpetuate the relationship between alcohol and authors. This is an important text for framing alcohol and other drugs as detrimental to authors and their writing. Distinct from writing, drinking and the development of alcoholism is a complex phenomenon to understand in its own right. In regards to the alcohol and the author, Hyde makes a distinction between intoxication and inspiration. Alcohol, like the supernatural spirits, can be guides to inspiration. The use of alcohol to the point of dependency is shifted the paradigm from the alcoholic spirits as guides to something more akin to demons, another colloquialism used to describe liquor.
Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956
Although he did continue to drink his entire life, it was his early years that were an endless bender of drinks and drugs. This book will be used to confirm the parallels between Jack Kerouac’s seemingly autobiographical novel On the Road and his own life. These years also parallel the years before, during, and immediately after the publication of On the Road. Which I will be close reading in order to identify not only Kerouac’s own substance abuse habits but also consider how substance abuse is used in literature as metaphors.
Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957-1969
Similarly to the book above, the correspondences between Kerouac and his peers will be considered to understand the relationship between his alcoholic lifestyle and his writing. These years parallel Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism and the writing of his novel the Dharma Bums. In dedication to the eastern philosophies he was exploring at the time, Kerouac became interested in spirituality and a departure from the material excess of his early life. Comparing On The Road and The Dharma Bums will hopefully provide an insight into the extent that substance abuse had on Kerouac’s writing since they were written during hedonistic and ascetic phases of his life respectively. The selected letters surrounding the time periods when Kerouac was writing the two novels will supplement my close reading analysis of the two texts.
On the Road
Jack Kerouac’s novel will serve as the primary text to be considered within Viktor Turner’s broadened conceptual framework of liminality. A great deal of the final capstone project will consist of analysis of the
Jack Kerouac, Prophet of the New Romanticism
This text supports that Beat literature was in the tradition of Romanticism. By making associations with notable predecessors, this text gives a reference for which to compare Kerouac’s philosophy of writing that I argue was liminal in nature. In Romantic tradition, there is an emph
Angelheaded Hipster: A Life of Jack Kerouac
This is a very general biogaphy of Jack Kerouac’s life. There is a visual companion to this text that is interesting. While there are more effective accounts of Kerouac’s life, this particular text was helpful to providing a broader context of Kerouac within the Beat Generation both as a literary movement as well as within the historical contexts of the day and age.