Style and subversion: Kerouac and the cultural Cold War

This dissertation offers a re-evaluation of Jack Kerouac, arguing for his significance in twentieth-century American literature by showing him to be a sophisticated stylist and conscious participant in Cold War debates about popular culture and national identity. It also forges a more productive relationship between cultural studies and literary stylistics, arguing that in cultural studies, very little attention is given to language, while in stylistics, very little attention is given to cultural context. This dissertation argues for the need to reconnect literary language with the dominant social issues of its moment, so that questions of ideology can be treated in a more concrete way than has so far been the case in literary studies generally. I call this approach cultural stylistics. Chapter One, "Towards a Cultural Stylistics," presents a theoretical justification of this approach and explains both the influence of Bakhtin and the need to move beyond his abstract approach to style. Chapter Two, "The Rhetoric of Culture in the Cold War," provides a detailed discussion of the politicizing of both high and low culture in American society after World War Two, linking this politicization to the perceived need for a strong national identity in the face of the communist threat, Soviet. Chapter Three, "'A New Style for American Culture': Jazz, Movies, Comics, and Spontaneous Prose," summarizes the development of Kerouac's spontaneous prose method and demonstrates the influence of popular culture on his style. Chapter Four, "Popular Culture and Worldview in Kerouac," considers the status of popular culture in his work generally, arguing that while Kerouac often reproduces the dominant social stereotypes of his time, he also critiques these stereotypes through the defamiliarizing effects of his radical prose style. Chapter Five, "The Dialogics of Popular Culture in Doctor Sax," uses Bakhtin to explore the style and ideology through a close reading of Kerouac's least known but most experimental novel. The conclusion, "Style and Subversion," looks at the reception of Kerouac by both the mass media and the literary establishment and argues that the ridicule and hostility he generated can be decisively linked to the radical worldview embodied in his prose style.