Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards
Jean-Christophe Cloutier talks with Brent Hayes Edwards about Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac, his new study that recasts Jack Kerouac as an ethnic, bilingual author, demonstrating that his French-Canadian upbringing and background were formative to his breakthrough literary achievements. Though Kerouac has long been mythologized as an all-American figure, the “King of the Beats” was born Jean-Louis Kérouac to immigrant parents from Québec and was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Kerouac not only secretly composed French manuscripts but also served as a self-translator to negotiate between French and English. Following years of archival excavation, Cloutier demystifies the Beat writer’s complex compositional practices and techniques of self-translation to show that the author’s famed “Spontaneous Prose Method” was in part a reaction to his thwarted hope to live in French. The book further reveals that Kerouac pioneered new ways of capturing the orality of North American French in his manuscripts, inventing a scripturality that shares an indelible kinship with French Caribbean and other creolized traditions of the Global Francophone world. Offering a new lens on an often-misunderstood figure, Big American Writer shows why Kerouac’s bilingualism changes how we understand his place in North American and world literature.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and a former Sheila Biddle Ford Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is the author of the award-winning Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (2019) and co-editor, with Brent Hayes Edwards, of Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (2017). His volume, La vie est d’hommage (2016), gathers the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, and his edition of Kerouac’s longest French novel, Sur le chemin, was released by Gallimard in 2023. An audiobook edition of Kerouac’s French writings, Sur le chemin et autres écrits en français, featuring readers from Québec to Haiti and passing through Acadia to Louisiana, is now available. He also translated two of Kerouac’s French manuscripts for the Library of America’s The Unknown Kerouac (2016).
Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is the editor of the journal PMLA. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003) and the English translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (Seagull, 2017). His most recent publications are the co-edited volume Écrire le monde noir (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2024), a collection of the interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, and Easily Slip into Another World (Knopf, 2023), the co-written autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, which won the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award in Pop Music, the Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year Award, and the American Book Award. Edwards was a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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