ABSTRACT
In their 1950s coming-of-age novels, the young Chinese writer Wang Meng and the famous American Beat writer Jack Kerouac show a surprising similarity: They reject the semi-global embrace of progress as a theory of history, instead favoring an anti-productivity vision of presence, spontaneity, and even transcendence. The discourse of youth in both novels expresses discomfort with mainstream values of directed, instrumental time, proposing in its place a sensual, pleasurable immanence. In addition, Kerouac’s On the Road has its own strange history in a limited-circulation Chinese 1963 translation, influencing young, “sent-down” youth who later challenged revolutionary Romanticism and formed the Misty Poetry school.
