False Rebels And The Manipulation Of Cultural Symbols

The Beat Generation was a literary movement of the 1950s in the United States, which had a broad and far-reaching impact on the late 20th American society. Among the writers in this period, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was known as the "King of the Beat Generation". his representative work On the Road was considered as "the Bible of Beat Generation". However, Kerouac's works have being misread by readers and commentators both in China and the United States for a long time. Kerouac was regarded as the decadent youth of the degenerated bourgeois class, or as the former hippies of Eisenhower era, anti-McCarthyism fighter, but these were not the true image of Kerouac. Kerouac was actually regarded as a model in the social movement, although he was reluctant and incapable to promote this movement.This paper associates Kerouac's life and discusses two intertwining and confrontational kinds of culture, which were the religious abstinence and the consumer hedonism in the 1950s and 1960s of the United States, so as to reveal a real Kerouac to readers. The first part of this paper discusses from the following aspects: the small town life of Jack Kerouac, the urbanism in New York then moved to west, the fame and shame after Kerouac's succession. In fact, Kerouac was a "strange, lonely, crazy Christian mysticism", who was a representative of the strong conservative force from a small town. This conservative force was the local basis and the mass basis of McCarthyism in the 1950s.The second and third part respectively expatiate how Kerouac's thought agreed with the main culture stream of conservatism in the 1950s from the points of spontaneous writing and rereading of the novel On the Road. Spontaneous writing can be purely attributed to Kerouac's attempt to explore new literary writing techniques, and it was born with a paradox of revolutionary and vanguard characters. The theme of On the Road is not the condemnation and dissatisfaction of the 1950s and 1960s American society. As the representative of the lower class, Deans were completely immersed in the optimistic mood of the victory of World War II at that time and enjoyed the highly prosperous American economy. They enjoyed the various facilities brought by social progress, and kept in line with the mainstream ideology.so that, the so-called rebellion was largely imposed by the later generation to a large extend.The fourth part probes into the reason why Kerouac became the Beat campaign incarnation, which he was unable to take on and tried to shake off. His value as a writer was replaced by Dean's cultural value as a crazy prophet. This part concludes the operation of Ginsberg on the Beat Generation, leftist movement, sub-culture and popular consumption culture,the middle class student movement in the 1960s,from hippies to yuppies, the commercialization of American publishing industry, and so on.