The same expansiveness, humour and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novels sparks this one too, but through a more cohesive story. The books follow two young men engaged in a passionate search for dharma or truth.
Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9780141972060
Category: Fiction
Page: 224
View: 175
THE DHARMA BUMS appeared just one year after the author's explosive ON THE ROAD had put the Beat Generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller list. The same expansiveness, humour and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novels sparks this one too, but through a more cohesive story. The books follow two young men engaged in a passionate search for dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high sierras to seek the lesson of solitude. With an Introduction by Kerouac expert, Ann Douglas.
See also Dharma bums; Dharma practice Dharma bums: Blake and, 8; dejection and, 150; equanimity of, 198; excitement as impetus for, 5; oversharing of secrets and, 231; samadhi cultivation by, 29 Dharma Bums, The (Kerouac), xi, ...
Author: Dean Sluyter
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 9781608687695
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 320
View: 113
HOW THE LITERATURE WE LOVE CONVEYS THE AWAKENING WE SEEK Suppose we could read Hemingway as haiku . . . learn mindfulness from Virginia Woolf and liberation from Frederick Douglass . . . see Dickinson and Whitman as buddhas of poetry, and Huck Finn and Gatsby as seekers of the infinite . . . discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and The Bluest Eye. Some of us were lucky enough to have one passionate, funny, inspiring English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Add a lifetime of teaching Dharma — authentic, traditional approaches to meditation and awakening — and you get award-winning author Dean Sluyter. With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, he unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from William Blake to Dr. Seuss, inspiring readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.
Justifiably pleased with the result , Kerouac went on to explain to Cowley the meaning of dharma bums , which he fashioned as " religious bums , " or " bums of the true meaning . " ( In Buddhism , dharma means the truth ; the saving ...
Author: Benedict Giamo
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809324318
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 246
View: 942
Jack Kerouac, a "ragged priest of the word" according to Ben Giamo, embarked on a spiritual quest "for the ultimate meaning of existence and suffering, and the celebration of joy in the meantime." For Kerouac, the quest was a sustained and creative experiment in literary form. Intuitive and innovative, Kerouac created prose styles that reflected his search for personal meaning and spiritual intensity. These styles varied from an exuberant brand of conventional narrative (On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Desolation Angels) to spontaneous bop prosody (Visions of Cody.Doctor Sax, and The Subterraneans). Giamo's primary purpose is to chronicle and clarify Kerouac's various spiritual quests through close examinations of the novels. Kerouac began his quest with On the Road, which also is Giamo's real starting point. To establish early themes, spiritual struggles, and stylistic shifts, however, Giamo begins with the first novel, Town and Country, and ends with Big Sur, the final turning point in Kerouac's quest. Kerouac was primarily a religious writer bent on testing and celebrating the profane depths and transcendent heights of experience and reporting both truly. Baptized and buried a Catholic, he was also heavily influenced by Buddhism, especially from 1954 until 1957 when he integrated traditional Eastern belief into several novels. Catholicism remained an essential force in his writing, but his study of Buddhism was serious and not solely in the service of his literary art. As he wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1954, "Since I saw you I took up the study of Buddhism and for me it's the word and the way I was looking for." Giamo also seeks IT?"a vital force in the experience of living that takes one by surprise, suspending for the moment belief in the ?real' concrete grey everyday of facts of self and selfhood . . . its various meanings, paths, and oscillations: from romantic lyricism to ?the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being and from the void-pit of the Great World Snake to the joyous pain of amorous love, and, finally, from Catholic/Buddhist serenity to the onset of penitential martyrhood."
The protagonist's search for a "Buddhist" context to his experiences (and those of others he encounters) recurrs throughout the story. The book had a significant influence on the Hippie counterculture of the 1960s.
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s. The book concerns duality in Kerouac's life and ideals, examining the relationship of the outdoors, mountaineering, hiking, and hitchhiking through the West with his "city life" of jazz clubs, poetry readings, and drunken parties. The protagonist's search for a "Buddhist" context to his experiences (and those of others he encounters) recurrs throughout the story. The book had a significant influence on the Hippie counterculture of the 1960s.
Kerouac makes it clear in The Dharma Bums that he does not believe that women can participate in 'Beat Zen', describing that Japhy's female lover: 'wanted to be a big Buddhist like Japhy and being a girl the only way she could express ...
Author: Sarah Daw
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9781474430043
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 256
View: 795
A study of a key modernist form, its theory, practice and legacy.
Two ebullient young men are engaged in a passionate search for dharma, or truth.
Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Amereon Limited
ISBN: 0848813995
Category: Fiction
Page: 192
View: 738
From the author of On The Road comes this story of two men enganged in a passionate search for Dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen Way, which takes them climbing into the high sierras to seek the lesson of solitude.
Caroline Kerouac The Dharma Bums—Nin Doctor Sax—Catherine “Nin” Duluoz Maggie Cassidy—Nin Gabrielle Kerouac Doctor Sax—Ange On the Road—Sal's Aunt The Town and the City—Marguerite Martin Vanity ofDuluoz—Ange Gerard Kerouac Doctor ...
Author: Paul Maher
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publications
ISBN: 9781589793668
Category: Biography & Autobiography
Page: 557
View: 111
This is the authoritative biography of writer, poet, and beat generation icon Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), whose novel On the Road catapulted him to the forefront of the literary world and influenced budding writers for generations to come. A legendaryfigure in the landscape of American literature, Kerouac lived a turbulent life, one more intimately connected to his literary output than perhaps any other writer. Restless traveler, alcoholic, dissolute but devoted Catholic, and genius, Kerouac lived hard with his compatriots of the beat movement--William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady. With them, he created a new type of American literature as well as an enduring literary mythology. Kerouac: The Definitive Biography recounts in gripping detail the story of this exceptional life and the key relationships that affected Kerouac's development as an artist, including those with his three wives, numerous girlfriends, and beloved mother. Most important, Kerouac is the first biography based wholly on the vast array of primary source materials contemporary to the events described--letters, postcards, diaries, journals, notebooks, newspaper and magazine articles, legal documents, and television andaudio transcripts--sources that provide an unparalleled view of the intimate thoughts and everyday world of Kerouac.