Department of English

• Monday, September 29, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are excited to welcome Jean-Christophe Cloutier (University of Pennsylvania) for a talk titled “These thoughts were all in French, almost untranslatable”: The Bilingual Manuscript Notebooks of Kerouac’s Maggie Cassidy.

Professor Cloutier writes:

“Jack Kerouac, countercultural figurehead of the Beat Generation, famously claimed that he wrote with “no revisions” using what he called the “Spontaneous Prose” method. Genetic analysis of the original manuscript notebooks of his coming-of-age novel Maggie Cassidy (written 1953, published 1959) reveals that he secretly composed it bilingually—that is, with some chapters in French, some in English, and with some chapters constantly codeswitching between both. Moreover, Kerouac made extensive revisions to certain sections of the manuscript during the typing phase—a phase he used to simultaneously translate the French segments into English before handing the completed typescript to potential publishers (who had no clue of the text’s bilingual past). To what extent is translation a form of revision? And in Kerouac’s case, to what extent is it essential to “the making of originals,” to use Karen Emmerich’s phrase? This talk will address Kerouac’s private compositional practices to reveal what the “Spontaneous Prose” method actually entailed for him; it will take a step toward decoding some of his sometimes strange edits, and explore some of his translative choices to ask whether there may be such a thing as “Spontaneous Translation."”

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, which won the Modern Language Association’s Matei Calinescu Prize, the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize, and the Waldo Gifford Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists. In 2017, he co-edited, with Brent Hayes Edwards, Claude McKay’s final novel, Amiable with Big Teeth (Penguin). He is the editor of La vie est d’hommage, which gathers the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, and translator into English of Kerouac’s French novellas for the Library of America’s The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly-Translated Writings. In 2023, Gallimard released his stand-alone edition of Sur le chemin, Kerouac’s longest French manuscript. He has just completed a study of Kerouac’s oeuvre entitled Big American Writer: Jack Kerouac, Bilingualism, and the Archive (with Columbia UP). His next project explores the wide networks of posthumousness in American letters—book collectors and auctioneers, literary estates and copyright law, librarians and archival repositories, editors and publishers, and other fine people.