Abstract
Written in what he would come to call his “spontaneous prose” method of delivery, the bourgeoning poeisis of Jack Kerouac's On the Road: The Original Scroll remains one of the most famous performative writing manuscripts of the twentieth century. This essay examines both the form and the content of Kerouac's poetics as an uncanny relay of whiteness and its performativity. Drawing upon Derrida's hauntology generally, and the uncanny aesthetic as outlined by Freud specifically, I argue that the figure of the ghost provides an important literary trope for understanding Kerouac's approach to racial haunting within postwar US America.
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