The Canadian-American Center presents: Jean Christophe Cloutier: Big American Writer: The Bilingual Self-Making of Jack Kerouac

April 3, 2025
@ 4:00 PM in
The Bangor room at the Memorial Union

Jean-Christophe Cloutier will discuss Jack Kerouac鈥檚 writerly coming of age from the perspective of his geopolitical and cultural-linguistic reality as a bilingual, first-generation immigrant Franco-American author. Cloutier will address the author鈥檚 private French manuscripts, preserved in his archive and published posthumously, to uncover an author who relied on self-translation to negotiate his lifelong dualism between French and English, and who willfully adopted what he called 鈥渢he tone of a big American writer鈥� to find literary success in the United States.

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is originally from Qu茅bec and is currently 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, and editor of La vie est d鈥檋ommage, which gathers the original French writings of Jack Kerouac. He also translated into English two of Kerouac鈥檚 French manuscripts for the Library of America鈥檚 The Unknown Kerouac. In 2023, Gallimard released his stand-alone edition of Sur le chemin, Kerouac鈥檚 longest French manuscript. He is currently completing an extensive study of Kerouac鈥檚 oeuvre that explores the writer鈥檚 practices as a bilingual novelist, translator, and archivist.

For more information, contact: frederic.rondeau@maine.edu