Hassan Melehy creëert verzen die putten uit een breed scala aan experimentele praktijken, van de zestiende eeuw tot heden. Zijn schrijven, geïnformeerd door het diverse erfgoed van zijn familie, verkent soms de ervaringen van tweede generatie Amerikanen. Het werk van de auteur wordt gekenmerkt door een eclectische benadering en een onderscheidende stem die lezers aantrekt die op zoek zijn naar onconventionele literaire ervaringen. Zijn gedichten zijn verschenen in talrijke gerespecteerde literaire tijdschriften.
Exploring the interplay between literature and philosophy at the dawn of modernity, Melehy analyzes the contributions of Michel de Montaigne and Rene Descartes to the understanding of the human subject. Montaigne's writing reveals the fluidity of subjective experience, while Descartes seeks certainty through the cogito, yet remains reliant on literary techniques he attempts to dismiss. This examination highlights the complex relationship between language and thought, as well as the foundational questions surrounding identity and expression in contemporary discourse.
Poetry. Hassan Melehy's debut collection is a blistering retort to the Eisenhower America that drove his literary heroes half-mad, expressed in a taut, sometimes furious, savage lyricism of a man born with a Muslim name at a time of growing hate. Exploring sexual desire, love, literary taste, and diving into the franco-American lingo of Kerouac, this is a discomfiting, passionate, and original expression of the Beat world for a 21st century in need of voices of protest.
Given Jack Kerouac's enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word �poetics.� But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous �spontaneous prose� only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice. Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to the French language and the reason for his bilingualism, the Qu�bec Diaspora. Although this background has long been recognized in French-language treatments, it is a new dimension in Anglophone studies of his writing. In a theoretically informed discussion, Hassan Melehy explores how Kerouac's poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a na�ve pursuit, Kerouac's writing practice not only responded but contributed to some of the major aesthetic and philosophical currents of the twentieth century in which notions such as otherness and nomadism took shape. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a major reassessment of a writer who, despite a readership that extends over much of the globe, remains poorly appreciated at home.
