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The Impact of Allen Ginsberg's Howl on American Counterculture
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Croatian Digital Thesis Repository UNIVERSITY OF RIJEKA FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Vlatka Makovec The Impact of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl on American Counterculture Representatives: Bob Dylan and Patti Smith Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the M.A.in English Language and Literature and Italian language and literature at the University of Rijeka Supervisor: Sintija Čuljat, PhD Co-supervisor: Carlo Martinez, PhD Rijeka, July 2017 ABSTRACT This thesis sets out to explore the influence exerted by Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl on the poetics of Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. In particular, it will elaborate how some elements of Howl, be it the form or the theme, can be found in lyrics of Bob Dylan’s and Patti Smith’s songs. Along with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and William Seward Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Ginsberg’s poem is considered as one of the seminal texts of the Beat generation. Their works exemplify the same traits, such as the rejection of the standard narrative values and materialism, explicit descriptions of the human condition, the pursuit of happiness and peace through the use of drugs, sexual liberation and the study of Eastern religions. All the aforementioned works were clearly ahead of their time which got them labeled as inappropriate. Moreover, after their publications, Naked Lunch and Howl had to stand trials because they were deemed obscene. Like most of the works written by the beat writers, with its descriptions Howl was pushing the boundaries of freedom of expression and paved the path to its successors who continued to explore the themes elaborated in Howl. -
Countercultural Reflections: the Beat Generation and Occupy Wall Street in Comparative Perspective
Countercultural Reflections: The Beat Generation and Occupy Wall Street in Comparative Perspective. Name: Anita Schmale Student number: 3341623 MA Thesis, American Studies Program, Utrecht University Supervisor: Dr. Joes Segal Date of submission: 25 July 2013 Word Count: 19,892 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Identifying the Beat Generation and Occupy Wall Street 7 2.1 Beat Generation 7 2.2 Occupy Wall Street 16 3. Expressions of Countercultural Ideas 26 3.1 Expressions of the Beat Generation 26 3.2 Expressions of Occupy Wall Street 31 4. Theories of Social Movements 35 4.1 Tilly & Tarrow 36 4.1.1 Beat Generation 38 4.1.2 Occupy Wall Street 43 4.1.3 Assessing the Theory 45 4.2 Klaus Eder 46 4.2.1 Beat Generation 49 4.2.2 Occupy Wall Street 52 4.2.3 Assessing the Theory 53 4.3 Gene Sharp 54 4.3.1 Beat Generation 57 4.3.2 Occupy Wall Street 60 4.3.3 Assessing the Theory 62 5. Conclusion 63 Works Cited 71 1. Introduction On September 18, 2011, one day after the so-called “Day of Rage”, The New York Times reports that a group of protesters gathered around the New York Stock Exchange and occupied Wall Street (Moynihan, “Protesters” par. 1). According to the newspaper, the protesters had been planning “September 17” for months and were aiming to occupy Wall Street “as an expression of anger over a financial system that they say favors the rich and powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens” (Moynihan, “Protesters” par. -
1 the Beat Generation the Beats Were a Criticism of American Complacency Under the Ike-Nixon Regime, an Expression of New Forms
The Beat Generation The Beats were a criticism of American complacency under the Ike-Nixon regime, an expression of new forms of prose, and poetry and an exploration of consciousness, which joined the dissent of existing Bohemias [...] to produce a distinct style of literature and living, based on disaffiliation, poverty, anarchic individualism and communal living. A relaxation of 'square' (puritan, middle-class, respectable) attitudes towards sex, drugs, religion and art became the opposing uniformity of 'beat' -Eric Monstram: The Penguin Companion to Literature The “Beat Generation” is viewed as an influential cultural revolution or a literary movement that emerged in the late 1940’s in the aftermath of World War II. The Beat movement was made up of a broad geographical range, from New York City to San Francisco. At first the majority of the “beats” lived in Greenwich Village, New York. They usually hung out together in coffeehouses, jazz bars, and in Washington Square Park, sharing ideas, creating works of art -especially poetry, listening to music and having wild parties. The poetry and novels they wrote were always about their own life experiences and hence biographical. The autobiographical fiction novels of Jack Kerouac and his fellow Beat writers show that without a specific philosophy, the Beat Generation sought to redefine the American Dream and reject middle class values through the pursuit of kicks and escape from convention. Over View In the Beat Book edited by Ann Waldman, the origin of the phrase is traced back to Jack Kerouac’s conversation with John Clellon Holmes in 1948: 1 They were discussing the nature of generations, recollecting the glamour of the Lost Generation, and Kerouac said, "Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation." They talked about whether it was a "found generation" (as Kerouac sometimes called it), an "angelic generation", or some other epithet. -
A Poetics of Resistance: the Postmodern Ginsberg
A Poetics of Resistance: The Postmodern Ginsberg Songok H. Thornton & William H. Thornton <Department of English, Providence University) The term postmodernism traces back to Irving Howe in the late 1950s, and gained currency with Leslie Fiedler and Ihab Hassan in the 1960s (Huyssen 256). Since that time the term has lost much of its radical bite, and is often (as with Habermas) viewed as a conservative sheep in wolf's clothes. Huyssen contends that "the adversary and critical element in the notion of postmodernism can only be fully grasped if one takes the late 19508 as the starting point of a mapping of the postmodern" (267). The early career of Ginsberg bears this out. Ginsberg's personal transition from Beat withdrawal into the involved, critical climate of the 1960' s counter-culture coincided with his return from the Orient to a very different America. As Bruce Cook describes it, no one "talked much about the Beat Generation anymore, but that didn't mean that he and Kerouac and Corso and all the rest had gone unheeded. The Hippies and Yippies of the 1960s appropriated the Beat message and agenda and made them their own. They welcomed Allen Ginsberg as a guru ... " (Cook 195). Thus Ginsberg's biographical transition was to be a milestone not only in the formation of postmodern poetics, but also in the development of what Huyssen calls a postmodernism of "resistance" (292). Bridging Beat Generation alienation and the radical mood of the 1960s, Ginsberg forged a poetic style featuring natural pictures of common life, yet directly expressing his political and social concerns. -
Allen Ginsberg
Beat poetry and the twentieth century: Allen Ginsberg Haidee Kotze Beat poetry and the twentieth century: Allen Ginsberg Haidee Kotze B.A., B.A. Hons Dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Magister Artium in the Department of English at the Potchefstroorn-u-n-LvAr~itv fnr r.hri~ti::~n l-linh"' r Education I -_F'OTCHEFSTROOMSE UNIVEF:Sirt::n VIR CHO \I~:ttt:YH \'''"•:,¥} 1999 -04-2 1 ~~§.~}/ Supervisor: Mr. J.-L. Kruger Vanderbijlpark November 1998 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people and institutions: • My supervisor, Jan-Louis Kruger, for his expertise, empathy and constant support. • Edward, for his love, patience and motivation. • My parents and family, for their continued encouragement and involvement throughout my academic career. • Vernon, for his friendship and compassion. • All my friends, colleagues and lecturers whose interest in this study contributed to it in various ways. • San Geldenhuys, Lizette Marais, Yvonne Engelbrecht and Christelle Oosthuizen of the Ferdinand Postma Library (Vaal Triangle Campus), for their helpful, enthusiastic and prompt assistance. • The Centre for Science Development (HSRC South Africa), for financial assistance. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are not necessarily to be attributed to the Centre for Science Development. • Sentrachem, for the additional financial support which made this study possible. Table of contents 1. Introduction: statement of problem, aims and methods ...... .. ................................. 1 1.1 Contextualisation -
Beat Generation and Postmodernism: Deconstructing the Narratives of America
2015 Beat Generation and Postmodernism: Deconstructing the Narratives of America Nicolas Deskos 10623272 MA Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture Supervisor: Dr Roger Eaton University of Amsterdam Contents Introduction 3 The American Dream 3 The Beat Generation 5 Postmodernism 8 Outline 9 Chapter 1: On the Road to a Postmodern Identity 11 Promise of the Road and Its Reality 12 What it Means to Be American 15 Searching for a Transcendent Identity 17 Chapter 2: Deconstructing Burroughs’ ‘Meaningless Mosaic’ 22 Language as a System of Control 23 Metafiction in Naked Lunch 27 Chapter 3: Ginsberg’s Mythical Heroes 32 Fragmentation of the Self 34 Heroes of the Past 39 Conclusion 43 Works Cited 47 2 Introduction This research aims to reinterpret and recontextualise the principal Beat writers – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs – from the theoretical perspective of postmodernism. I aim to go beyond the traditional interpretation of the Beat Generation as a countercultural, counterhegemonic movement and challenge the “binary opposition between the establishment culture and a dissenting counterculture” (Martinez 7). Through the interpretative paradigm of postmodernism, I want to show that the Beat writers were concerned with the tension between the myths of America and its reality, appropriating one’s identity in the face of a dominant culture, and questions surrounding being, existence and reality. In doing so, I will locate their texts within the discourses of the mainstream as opposed to at its margins. Thus, I will argue that Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg deconstruct, in their own ways, the official and mythical narratives of America, particularly the narrative on which the country is built: the American Dream. -
Dostoevsky and the Beat Generation
MARIA BLOSHTEYN Dostoevsky and the Beat Generation American literary history is rich with heroes of counterculture, maverick writers and poets who were rejected by the bulk of their contemporaries but inspired a cult-like following among a few devotees. The phenomenon of Beat Generation writers and poets, however, is unique in twentieth-century American letters precisely because they managed to go from marginal underground classics of the 1950s to the official voice of dissent and cultural opposition of the 1960s, a force to be reckoned with. Their books were adopted by hippies and flower children, their poems chanted at sit-ins, their lives faithfully imitated by a whole generation of young baby boomers. Their antiauthoritarian ethos along with their belief in the brotherhood of mankind were the starting point of a whole movement that gave the United States such social and cultural watersheds as Woodstock and the Summer of Love, the Chicago Riots and the Marches on Washington. The suggestion that Dostoevsky had anything to do with the American Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and street rioting in American urban centres might seem at first to be far-fetched. It is, however, a powerful testimony to Dostoevsky’s profound impact on twentieth-century American literature and culture that the first Beats saw themselves as followers of Dostoevsky and established their personal and literary union (and, as it were, the entire Beat movement) on the foundation of their shared belief in the primacy of Dostoevsky and his novels. Evidence of Dostoevsky’s impact on such key writers and poets of the Beat Generation as Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), and William Burroughs (1914-1997) is found in an almost embarrassing profusion: scattered throughout their essays, related in their correspondence, broadly hinted at and sometimes explicitly indicated in their novels and poems. -
Beat Generation Alongside Figures Like D.H
SEX AND THE BODY IN MICHAEL MCCLURE’S QUEST ‘FOR THE MAMMAL SELF’ FRANCA BELLARSI Sexuality and the Beat Generation Alongside figures like D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, the ‘Beat Generation’ writers believed that sexuality had been harmfully evacuated from literature. Though a heterogeneous group, the Beats were united in their wish to counter the diseased consciousness which, in their eyes, affected the post-World War II American mainstream1 and its conformist adherence to the American Way of Life turned into a kind of civil religion.2 To the Beat Generation, one of the roads to rebellion was the refusal to abide by the tacit censorship, which had, for so long, made writers refrain from frankly, and candidly representing the sex act. Profoundly influenced by Whitman and Blake, the Beat Generation poets rejected Puritanical repression and denied any gap between the sacred and the profane. This dismissal of the binary opposition between the earthly and the holy, the physical and the spiritual led to a form of hybrid mysticism in which the integration of desire, pleasure, and sexual energy was part and parcel of the search for a more authentic consciousness than the one moulded by mass media conditioning, the McCarthyist containment of un- American ideas, and the cycle of work, production and consumption.3 In their quest for mind expansion, the Beats considered it essential to return to the body and to drop the psychological armour created by 1 See Allen Ginsberg, ‘Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs’ (1959), in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995, ed. Bill Morgan, New York, 2000, 3-5. -
Beatnik Fashion
Greater Bay Area Costumers Guild Volume 12, Number 5 September-October 2014 Beatnik Fashion Not every member of the Beat Generation wore a beret BY KALI PAPPAS s any fan of the Beat Generation writers will tell The Beatnik. When most people hear the word “beatnik,” you, there’s a chasmic difference between the they probably imagine bored-looking bohemian gals in A beret-wearing, bongo-beating “beatnik” of berets and guys in turtlenecks and weird little goatees. These popular imagination and the people who created stereotypes are rooted in truth, but like the term “beatnik” and lived the Beat philosophy in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. In itself, they’re not really very representative of the movement defined by the “Beat Generation” nor the people inspired by its counterculture philosophy. The reality is that the intellectuals, artists, and anti- bourgeois iconoclasts of mid-twentieth century America dressed a lot like everyone else. Legendary San Fig. 1: Spoofing beatnik stereotypes Fig. 2: Jack Kerouac Francisco columnist Herb Caen created the anticipation of our “On the Road” event in November, I’ve term “beatnik” in 1958, a portmanteau of “beat” and compiled a short list of looks - for both men and women - that “Sputnik” (as in the Soviet satellite) that - in conjunction combine standard 1950s fashions with enough bohemian with a short report about freeloading hep cats helping sensibility to help you fit in without looking like a stereotype themselves to booze at a magazine party - was meant to (unless you really want to). poke fun at common perceptions of the counterculture. -
University of Birmingham Material Language for Protest
University of Birmingham Material language for protest Cran, Rona DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1517105 License: None: All rights reserved Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Cran, R 2018, 'Material language for protest: collage in Allen Ginsberg's 'Wichita Vortex Sutra'', Textual Practice, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 669-689. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1517105 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Textual Practice on 26/10/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1517105 checked on 6/12/2018 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. -
Material Language for Protest Cran, Rona
University of Birmingham Material language for protest Cran, Rona DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1517105 License: None: All rights reserved Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Cran, R 2018, 'Material language for protest: collage in Allen Ginsberg's 'Wichita Vortex Sutra'', Textual Practice, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 669-689. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1517105 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Textual Practice on 26/10/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1517105 checked on 6/12/2018 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. -
Allen Ginsberg's Many Multitudes Joseph Karwin University of Texas at Tyler
University of Texas at Tyler Scholar Works at UT Tyler English Department Theses Literature and Languages Spring 5-9-2018 The heP nomenological Beat: Allen Ginsberg's Many Multitudes Joseph Karwin University of Texas at Tyler Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uttyler.edu/english_grad Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Karwin, Joseph, "The heP nomenological Beat: Allen Ginsberg's Many Multitudes" (2018). English Department Theses. Paper 17. http://hdl.handle.net/10950/1159 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Literature and Languages at Scholar Works at UT Tyler. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Department Theses by an authorized administrator of Scholar Works at UT Tyler. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PHENOMENOLOGOICAL BEAT: ALLEN GINSBERG’S MANY MULTITUDES by JOSEPH KARWIN A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts English Department of Literature & Languages Anett Jessop, Ph.D., Committee Chair College of Graduate Studies The University of Texas at Tyler May 2018 The University of Texas at Tyler Tyler, Texas This is to certify that the Master’s Thesis of JOSEPH KARWIN has been approved for the thesis requirement on April 17, 2018 for the Master of Arts English degree © Copyright 2018 by Joseph Karwin All rights reserved. Table of Contents Abstract ...........................................................................................................................ii