Posavec dissects every word, phrase, sentence, and subject of Kerouac's On the Road to invent new ways of looking at the familiar masterpiece. The diagrams make for beautiful art in their own right. (See source for high-res pictures.)

In her structure analysis, each chapter explodes in a color-coded starburst of topical breakdowns. At a glance, you can see Kerouac's focus wander from the sketches of local life in the beginning, to depictions of work and travel in the middle, with women and the subject of love dominating the latter chapters.

The comparative sentence diagrams are what really drew me in. It's fascinating to behold an entire literary work all at once on one page. What's more, Kerouac's casual prose style can be differentiated immediately from the stately, grandiose writing of Faulkner, not to mention the terse, claustrophobic style of Orwell's fiction.

Literary reductionism at its most fun and beautiful.

A beautiful site, thanks!

A great find!

Wonderful.

Art Pop

Agree. Agree. Agree.

Amazing!

I want to turn these into wallpaper!

This is your vocabulary...

Now here is your vocabulary on amphetemines!

Just what I've always wanted to see!
But who else could we map? Somehow, I suddenly want to see the map of Bevis and Butthead.

Huh huhu Fire
\ | / \
\ Uh? | / \ TP
\ | | / \ |
\ | | / \ |
Cornhulio ______ Bung Hole
/ | \
/ | \
/ Cool \
Rock Lame

This may well be a universal mode of cultural analysis!

damn, all that formatting I tried to put in there, gone... it was a beautiful map, really...