Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form

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Beat Studies / Literary Criticism “In Michael Hrebeniak’s Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, we at last have a full-length study of Kerouac that does justice to the depth of his intellect and the significance of his formal innovations. Hrebeniak . . . articulates better than any critic thus far the sociopolitical significance of Kerouac’s beautiful, ragged, unpredictable prose.”—The Beat Review “Michael Hrebeniak has opened up serious issues that are always overlooked— propaganda, Marcuse, Olson’s Human Universe, for starters. Hrebeniak’s assessment of Kerouac’s work as a ‘swirling meditation on memory and recirculation of events’ is a beautiful portal swinging wide. A complete success.”—Michael McClure, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright “Michael Hrebeniak has written an exceptional book on Jack Kerouac, a book that melds criticism, narrative, and polemic into an entirely new alloy. It’s strange, alive, angry, and yet controlled . . . a magnificent book.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind “Michael Hrebeniak’s work is indeed rare. I don’t know of another scholarly work that goes as far to ground Kerouac’s Legend of Duluoz in such a wide and deep knowledge of world literatures.”—Regina Weinreich, author of The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac isbn 0-8093-2867-4 isbn 978-0-8093-2867-3 Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form connects the personal and creative development of the Beat generation’s famous icon with cultural changes in postwar America. Michael Hrebeniak asserts that Jack Kerouac’s “wild form”—self-organizing narratives free of literary, grammatical, and syntactical conventions—moves within an experimental continuum across the arts to generate a Dionysian sense of writing as raw process. Action Writing highlights how Kerouac made concrete his 1952 intimation of “something beyond the novel” by assembling ideas from Beat America, modernist poetics, action painting, bebop, and subterranean oral traditions. Michael Hrebeniak is a Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge. Printed in the United States of America Southern Illinois University Press 1915 university press drive mail code 6806 carbondale, il 62901 www.siu.edu/~siupress Cover illustration by Michael Hrebeniak ...