Genre specifics of novels by Jack Kerouac
In the 1950-1960s the US social regulations became more rigid, the censorship was strengthened and the cult of material values was rising. As a result, a great number of new forms and techniques opposing to the formal and conventional literary mainstream emerged in fiction. Novels by Jack Kerouac may serve as a striking example. All the novels from the series of Duluoz Legend series are separate works published in different times, but making up the whole epic work with the same plot lines as in the series novels, with main heroes who easily resemble real prototypes, toposes, which may be recognized and with similar ideas. In all the novels of the series the narrator is identified with the author and the main hero. The series of Duluoz Legend contain all the formal and content features of the autobiography genre, which is marked out by F. Lejeune, except the "autobiographical pact, substituted by the novel pact", since J. Kerouac repeatedly emphasized autobiographic features of his works in his correspondence and interviews. However, besides evident autobiographic traits, these novels provide an attempt to expand the autobiography genre. There are such features as the fragmentary nature, combining the attributes of different literary genres and engaging the features of other arts, the multi-dimension space and time structure etc. The texts of the novels by this writer include film scripts, radio interviews, drama features. The typical laws of the time and space autobiography organization are violated due to the use of spontaneous methods of writing which are used by J. Kerouac and the associative principle of the plot making. The literary chronotopos is continuously changing, thus intensifying the fragmentation effect. Apparently, it shows the expansion of the autobiography genre in the writer's novels to the level of the autobiography meta-genre.