Join us at this week's meeting of the Philosophy Club virtually or in-person (Auerbach 320) on Wednesday, Oct. 21 from 1 p.m.—2 p.m. as Jean-Christophe Cloutier presents, “Meanings that can never be recorded in the English language: Jack Kerouac’s Bilingualism and the Maggie Cassidy Manuscript."
Jack Kerouac, countercultural figurehead of the Beat Generation, famously claimed that he wrote with “no revisions” using what he called the “Spontaneous Prose” method. Genetic analysis of the original manuscript notebooks of his coming-of-age novel Maggie Cassidy (written 1953, published 1959) reveals that he secretly composed it bilingually—that is, with some chapters in French, some in English, and with some chapters constantly codeswitching between both. Moreover, Kerouac made extensive revisions to sections of the manuscript during the typing phase—a phase he used to simultaneously translate the French segments into English before handing the completed typescript to potential publishers (who had no clue of the text’s bilingual past). To what extent is translation a form of revision? and could there be such a thing as “Spontaneous Translation”? This talk looks at how the Maggie notebooks foreground Kerouac’s bilingualism as a textual condition, and how the intermingling of his languages is made material via the archive, reflecting both his inner struggles, his dualism(s), and the pathways to literary innovation that Kerouac forged on his lonely Franco-American road.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia UP, 2019) and Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac (Columbia UP, 2026)*. He co-edited Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (Penguin Classics, 2017), and edited La vie est d’hommage (Boréal, 2016) as well as Sur le chemin (Gallimard, 2023); the latter two volumes gather the original French writings of Jack Kerouac. He has translated Kerouac’s two French novels for The Unknown Kerouac (The Library of America, 2016), and recently released an audiobook edition of Kerouac’s French texts, Sur le chemin et autres écrits en français, available on most audiobook platforms around the globe (Libro, Google Play, Apple Books, etc).
Questions? Contact Brian Skelly at bskelly@hartford.edu or 413.273.2273.
An ongoing weekly tradition at the University since 2001, the University of Hartford Philosophy Club is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
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