The Bilingual Confessions of Jack Kerouac: Translation and the Making of a “Big American Writer”: A Talk by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

Building on years of archival excavation, textual reconstruction, and translation, this talk repositions Kerouac in his actual geopolitical and cultural-linguistic reality as a bilingual, first-generation immigrant Franco-American author. It will address how his recently published French manuscripts—including Sur le chemin, released by Gallimard in 2023—reveal a wholly-different Kerouac, one who secretly relied on self-translation to negotiate his lifelong dualism between French and English, and who willfully adopted what he called “the tone of a big American writer” to find literary success in the United States. 

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.