All Program Dates
October 6, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
October 20, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
November 3, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
November 17, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
November 24, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
Registration
Tuition/Admission for this course is $300. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
To promote access to onsite and virtual Rosenbach experiences, we offer scholarships for each Signature Program. To inquire, email Sunstein Senior Manager of Digital Initiatives Edward G. Pettit at epettit@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Thursday, August 27, for Rosenbach members on Thursday, September 3, and for the general public on Thursday, September 10.
Description
Initially typed on a 120-foot-long scroll in April 1951, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is widely regarded as the novel that ignited the birth of American postwar counterculture when it was finally published, after significant revisions, in 1957. Translated in over 25 languages worldwide, the book has continued to enjoy a wide global readership, and its influence on generations of popular readers is remarkable. As Joyce Carol Oates wrote, Kerouac “permanently changed the course of our fiction,” while Bob Dylan put it this way: “I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” Over the years, the novel has been both praised and derided by critics. On the one hand, On the Road’s jazzed-up high-octane prose can be seen as providing a sweeping portrayal of the American melting pot, and Kerouac as being ahead of his time in writing lovingly about ethnic minorities and migrant workers in the 1950s. Some critics, however, have seen in Kerouac a tendency to exoticize marginalized populations; his novels nothing more than the “dreams of a white boy slumming,” as one scholar put it. On the Road is both a modern epic of male escape from domesticity, peddling a fantasy of mobility as freedom (often at the expense of those left behind), and a disarmingly authentic search for meaning and spirituality in a fallen postwar world of conformity, capitalism, and prescribed sexual norms. In this course, we will try to come to terms with the novel’s complex legacy as we read it both in the context of its time and through the lens of Kerouac’s own background as a first-generation American born of French-Canadian parents.To better understand the impact of Kerouac’s bilingualism on his unique style of American English, the course will culminate with a reading, in English translation, of Kerouac’s first French novella, The Night is my Woman, written just weeks before he sat down to type up that fateful scroll of On the Road—an artifact that fetched over 12 million dollars on auction earlier this year.
Instructor
Jean-Christophe Cloutier is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches 20th and 21st Century American and African American literature, comics and graphic novels, and archival research methods. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia UP, 2019) and Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac (forthcoming October 2026, Columbia UP). He is co-editor of Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (Penguin Classics, 2017), and editor of La vie est d’hommage (Boréal, 2016) and Sur le chemin (Gallimard, 2023), which gather the original French writings of Jack Kerouac. He also translated two of Kerouac’s French manuscripts for the Library of America’s The Unknown Kerouac (2016).