“[A]n Exterior Air of Pilgrimage”: The Resilience of Pilgrimage Ecopoetics and Slow Travel from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
Date
2020-10-08
Authors
Morrison, Susan Signe
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Abstract
While the Beats can be seen as critical actors in the environmental humanities, their works should be seen over the longue durée. They are not only an origin, but are also recipients, of an environmentally aware tradition. With Geoffrey Chaucer and Jack Kerouac, we see how a contemporary American icon functions as a text parallel to something generally seen as discrete and past, an instance of the modern embracing, interpreting, and appropriating the medieval. I argue that The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer influenced Kerouac’s shaping of On the Road. In the unpublished autograph manuscript travel diary dating from 1948–1949 (On the Road notebook), Kerouac imagines the novel as a quest tale, thinking of pilgrimage during its gestation. Further, Kerouac explicitly cites Chaucer. His novel can be seen not only in the tradition of Chaucer, but can bring out aspects of pilgrimage ecopoetics in general. These connections include structural elements, the spiritual development of the narrator, reliance on vernacular dialect, acute environmental awareness, and slow travel. Chaucer’s influence on Kerouac highlights how certain elements characteristic of pilgrimage literature persist well into the modern period, in a resilience of form, language, and ecological sensibility.
Description
Keywords
pilgrimage, Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, ecocriticism, ecopoetics, slow travel, vernacular, English
Citation
Morrison, S. S. (2020). “[A]n exterior air of pilgrimage”: The resilience of pilgrimage ecopoetics and slow travel from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Humanities, 9(4), 117.
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© 2020 The Author.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.