Poética beat no cinema: “Howl” e On the road

Abstract

This paper constitutes a comparative study between the pinnacle works of the American beat generation of the twentieth century (“Howl”, by Allen Ginsberg, and On the road, by Jack Kerouac) e their filmic adaptations produced in the first decade of the twentieth first century. Our goal is to bring forth a dialogue established by these four objective elements, based on the analysis of the congress of their individual poetics, and, in light of this, to contribute to a process that appears to be contemporarily inescapable, the relations between cinema and literature. To this end, the following dissertation will consist of the study of regularities of behavior in the adaptation process presented in the corpus before us as a means of deducing and describing possible systemic norms that underlie and regulate the transpositions between the beat literary system and the contemporary cinematographic system. On the other hand, but not separately, as we understand adaptation as rounded semiotic systems, we must consider the contexts in which they are inserted and what relations they actualize within their arrival system, not only that but investigate possible analogies to the departure system, We hope to demonstrate that these different strands of the problem are intertwined and connected if we create a common filed of tension in which the art-works are able to sustain dialogue – this we endeavored to do with the stablishment of an organizing principle, the common theme of madness. Our goal is, ultimately, to try to equate the importance of the product of adaptation and its counterpart in our analysis, transforming the field of Translation Studies into something closer to Compared Studies – of Literature or Cinema, as if our objects of research were ontologically comparable entities. We base our endeavor to achieve this task in the works of Walter Benjamin (2012), Mikhail Bakhtin (2010), Itamar Even-Zohar (1990), Jacques Derrida (1995), Maurice Blanchot (1987), Michel Foucault (1989), Gideon Toury (1995), Patrick Catrysse (1992), amongst others.