Road Rhetoric: Polyphony in Jack Kerouac's On The Road

Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road has been taken up as a political, literary, and nationalistic text in popular culture and the imaginary. In this study I explain the appeal of this text by using Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of polyphony to analyze the novel, suggesting that a focus on potentialities of meaning and their construction might be a pedagogical resource for approaching complex literary texts.

Stephen Llano, Ph.D. studies debate and rhetoric as associate professor at St. John's University in New York. In addition to his work on the Beats he researches debate pedagogy, Buddhist rhetoric, and critical theory. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.A. from Syracuse University.