Katrina Daly Annotated Bibliography

Katrina Daly Annotated Bibliography

Bill, Roger. “Traveller or Tourist? Jack Kerouac and the Commodification of Culture.”
Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 34, no. 3, 2010, pp. 395–417. JSTOR, JSTOR

Roger Bill, in this article, questions whether Kerouac’s travels, which he describes in the
pages of his novels and stories, aligned less with nomadism and more with with tourism with an effect of commodifying culture. Kerouac and the Beat generation are frequently described as rebelling against conformity and modernization; Bill offers a different stance. In posing this question, he first offers Kerouac’s perspective on his own identity. In the Introduction to Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac writes that at the age of 18 he decided to be “an adventurer, a lonesome traveler,” and alternately describes himself as a “Hobo” or sometimes “not a real hobo.” Bill proposes that while Kerouac and the Beats symbolized the rebellion of a generation, they behaved in ways that resembled travelers that can be categorized as tourists. Bill goes so far as to suggest that the motives for Kerouac’s foreign travels are less than innocent, citing examples of Kerouac’s frequent use of drugs and exploitation of women. There are evidence to support the claims that Kerouac was sexist, racist, homophobic, and a neo-colonialist, for whom foreign travel was a sort of ‘colonial quest.’ His nostalgia for an imagined golden age is aligned with Romanticism, which is at the heart of tourism, Bill suggests. He extends his argument by contrasting Charles Bukowski, who wrote during the same era as Kerouac. Bukowski, who always distanced himself from the Beats, lived a life more aligned with the characteristics of a ‘hobo,’ working menial jobs. Kerouac, conversely, came from a middle-class family and was able to return home in times of struggle. Bill also cites the work of Jack London, who wrote half a century earlier than Kerouac, determining that his writing reflects a class-consciousness that is lacking in Kerouac. Bill concludes that despite these grievances, the road which Kerouac traveled served as a “quest for authenticity” (396) and the object of his search for truth was real.


This will be helpful to my research because Bill offers a different perspective that I have not yet uncovered. He addresses Kerouac’s own words, which are found in my Omeka entry for Lonesome Traveler. By reminding his audience of the evidence to support claims suggesting that Kerouac’s travels were not innocent, but exploitative, he removes an aspect of the glorification of Kerouac that I have encountered thus far. It is interesting to explore this opinion, which certainly brings his flaws to attention. Bill’s conclusion, which is seemingly positive in that he does not deny Kerouac’s authenticity, perhaps suggests that interpretation of Kerouac must exist at a deeper level. The ways in which the cultural memory of Kerouac differs leads me to the question: does defining Kerouac as a ‘tourist’ instead of a ‘lonesome traveler’ change the way we read and think about his novels?

Prothero, Stephen. “On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest.” The
Harvard Theological Review, vol. 84, no. 2, 1991, pp. 205–222. JSTOR, JSTOR

Stephen Prothero frames his argument throughout this piece by explaining the two
interpretive lines surrounding the Beat movement: the first is a tendency to view the movement rather narrowly, while the second is an impulse to judge that impulse negatively. What consistently bothered critics the most about the Beats was their ‘negativity’. They were believed to be at war with sacred American ideals during the Eisenhower era. Nowadays, Beat literature is edging its way into the American literary canon. Prothero wants to propel this recognition forward: he suggests that it should have a prominent place in both American religious and literary history. The Beats were, he believes, spiritual protesters and literary innovators who through writing are “understanding and explicating the private hells of those who remained on the margins of postwar prosperity.” The Beats are not monotheistic; Kerouac, though raised Catholic, explored Buddhism. We see this exploration in several of his works, including Dharma Bums. Gary Snyder, a mountain poet and Zen initiative, is immortalized in Kerouac’s pages as Japhy Ryder. This commitment to a spiritual search is described as “liberating” for the beats, as it “empowered them to deny absolute reality of material world even as they affirmed spiritual experiences in it” (216). Kerouac and his fellow Beats, for these reasons, deserve to be studied among the ranks of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau, Emerson, and their likenesses.

This article will be extremely useful for my research, as I am grappling with the importance of the way that society remembers Kerouac and the beat movement. He addresses the concerns of critics, and attempts to discredit them by citing various examples of true spiritual exploration in works across the movement. He links this spiritual exploration with Kerouac’s nomadic lifestyle, writing that “They went on the road because they could not find God in the churches and synagogues of post-war America” (217). This article views Kerouac’s travels and writing as more than tourism-- he seesaws between the material and the spiritual and documents it like not many others have.