Beat Movement Research Articles

RELOOKING BEAT GENERATION AND THE SPIRIT OF REBELLION IN HOWL

In the history of American Literature, the Beat Generation secures a position which defines the spirit of protest in literature. The Beat Generation or Beat Movement was not only a literary movement but also a cultural movement that spearheaded several counter-cultural movements in the second half of twentieth-century America. This essay explores and examines the rebellious traits of the Beat Generation by addressing their style, technique, language and content. While the Beats were against the conformist values of post-war America, they also challenged the established traditional values. These challenges and protests are studied by analysing Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”. As “Howl” marked the beginning of a new era in literature. The poem is not only rebellious in style or content, but it paved the way to an end to censorship of literary texts. The paper briefly delves into the history of the movement and how it corresponds with the content of the “Howl”.

Naked Truths as a Credo of Protest in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States was abounded with darkened repercussions represented by waging wars such as the cold war, the Vietnam War, and the appearance of various ideologies as materialism, consumerism, sexual freedom, racial struggles and many other examples and consequently, new trends and movements appeared to rebel against the conventional norms that prevailed during that time. The rebellion took an upward trajectory crystalizing itself in diverse forms namely: the religious, political, social and literary ones. Unruly politics and queer activisms defied the commonplace hetero-normative ways of peaceful demonstrations. The beat movement burst out against what was believed as repressive, dehumanized, corrupt, and unjust in the United States of America. Allen Ginsberg's monumental poem "Howl" seems to be the manifesto of the movement. Most striking quality is the use of naked truth as an expression of the poet's own eccentricity. This quality makes the poem a landmark of eccentricity. "Howl" reflects and connotes a deeply celestial interpretation. A celestial reading of the poem will mend its presupposed deformed image, prove the opposite, and support the basic theme of protest which is at the center of the beat movement.

The Mammal Thing

Celebrated as a leader of London’s ‘Underground’ in the 1960–70s, and a leading British poet and performance artist of his time, Jeff Nuttall found fame through his critique of post-nuclear culture, Bomb Culture, which provided an influential rationale for artistic practice through absurdism but lost that recognition a decade or so later. Less well recognised, and with greater influence, is the distinctively visceral sensibility underlying much of his creative work, notably his poetry that draws on Dylan Thomas and the Beat Movement, his graphic drawing and luscious painting styles, and his pioneering performance art. This article argues that it is through these artistic expressions of visceral intelligence that Jeff Nuttall’s art and its long-term influence can now best be understood. It is intended to complement the Jeff Nuttall Papers in the Special Collections of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, deposited by the gallerist and poetry publisher Robert Bank (1941–2015), to whose memory this article is dedicated. Further papers have been added by Nuttall’s friends and relatives.

Quantal Response and Histopathological Effects of Sub-lethal Concentrations of a Selected Oilfield Chemical on African Catfish (Clarias gariepinus)

The behavioural and histological effects of sublethal concentrations (0.0 ml/L, 12.8 ml/L, 25.59 ml/L, 38.39 ml/L, 51.19 ml/L, and 63.99 ml/L) of Xylene were evaluated in African Catfish (Clarias gariepinus) after 28 days of exposure. Physico-chemical parameters such as temperature, conductivity, hydrogen ion concentration (pH), total hardness, total dissolved solids, dissolved oxygen, total alkalinity, ammonia, and nitrate levels in the experiment were monitored using the standard method. Significant variations were observed in the different units except for the controlled unit. Behavioural changes were observed closely during the sublethal toxicity test using standard procedures. The bioassay experiments were repeated three times and the renewable test method was used. concentrations showed histopathological alterations in the gills and liver. Severely deformations were observed at 12.80ml/l, 38.39ml/l), 51.19ml/l, and 63.99ml/l. No form of abnormalities was observed in the fish gill and liver in the controlled unit. Progressive hyperventilation, faster operculum and tail beat movement, erratic movement, gulping of air, and spiralling. jumping, display of vigorous jerky movement suffocation, and loss of reflex were observed in C. gariepinus exposed to higher sublethal concentrations of Xylene. There was a significant dose-dependent variation in parameters in the experiment. In conclusion, xylene caused an alteration in the histopathological parameters and the behaviour of C. garienpinus. Therefore, we recommend the need for realistic regulatory measures and proper monitoring and sensitization on use to stakeholders.

Behavioural Toxicity of a Combined Oilfield Chemicals on African Catfish (Clarias gariepinus) (Burchell 1822)

The toxicity of the combination of xylene and diesel at a 50:50 ratio on the African catfish (Clarias gariepinus) was investigated using a static bioassay for 96hrs. No significant difference (P>0.05) was observed in the Physicochemical parameters of the experimental water after exposure for 24 hours among the different concentration gradients and the controlled unit. Although there was an increased variation along the concentration gradient observed after 96hours. The behavioral responses of the test fish from 24-96 hours of exposure show normal behavioral responses in the control. C. gariepinus exposed to 25 ml/l to 50 mg/l concentration of the toxicant showed normal behavior from 24 to 48 hours. Afterward, the fish that were active stopped swimming and remained static for a while in response to the sudden changes in the surrounding environment. Generally, fish exposed to higher concentrations such as 100 ml/l to 250 ml/l of the test chemicals showed progressive hyperventilation and abnormal behavior like gulping air, erratic swimming movement, very fast swimming, jumping, and displaying vigorous jerky movement suffocation, and loss of reflex. A faster operculum and tail beat movement was also observed with Spiraling. The behavioral responses increased significantly (P<0.05) with an increase in concentration per time as compared to the control group of fish. The noticeable behavioural difference was recorded for the different concentrations of the test chemical. An eco-friendly chemical that is within the acceptable limits recommended by WHO and DPR should be used in well stimulation and cleaning for sustainable biodiversity and a healthy aquatic environment.

The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto

Reviewed by: The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto Erik Mortenson Steven Belletto. The Beats: A Literary History. Cambridge UP, 2020. x + 463 pp. Beat writers are often seen as postwar isolatos—Romantic figures of rebellion who turned their backs on postwar conformism to forge boldly ahead in new literary directions. As compelling as such formulations might be, they hide the Beats’ indebtedness to the culture that produced them. Steven Belletto’s The Beats: A Literary History offers a fresh perspective on these time-worn assumptions. By placing well-known as well as lesser-known Beat texts into a useful dialogue [End Page 806] with cultural concerns, Belletto has created a book that is extremely relevant and timely—a much-needed overview of Beat writing, it provides a general introduction while simultaneously making important claims that deserve further exploration. The book is divided into four parts that examine the Beats as both writers and social phenomenon and is organized, for the most part, chronologically. The first part starts with an engaging reading of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs’s coauthored novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written in 1945. Belletto effectively demonstrates that, far from a simple chronicle of the famous murder of David Kammerer, which has become a staple of Beat lore, the novel rehearses the act of narrativization in ways essential for understanding the interplay between representation and lived reality in the Beat canon. Belletto concludes the section by tracing the beginnings of the Beat movement, putting it into dialogue with other mid-century avant garde literary communities such as the Black Mountain poets and the New York School. In the next part, Belletto provides an engaging examination of early Beat novels, which are only now getting the attention they deserve, then moves into more familiar territory with an examination of classic Beat texts by writers such as Burroughs, Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Part 3, “The Beatnik Era and the Profusion of Beat Literature (1958-1962),” looks at early critical reviews, little magazines, and a series of discussions on lesser-known but equally-important Beat writers outside the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs triumvirate, from Diane di Prima and Gregory Corso, to the more obscure, such as David Meltzer, Ron Loewinsohn, and Sheri Martinelli. Part 4 is a shorter discussion of Beat politics but includes sections on Beat women’s writing, lesser-read Beat novels such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Her and Corso’s The American Express. It ends with an examination of how the 1960s Vietnam Era pushed many Beat writers into the overtly political, with special emphasis on Ginsberg and Ed Sanders. The work functions through a series of close readings coupled with either social or literary-historical contextualization, which provides readers with a sense of not only writers’ individual voices and preoccupations but also how they fit into the larger scene that is Beat. Ginsberg’s celebrated long poem Howl is discussed through an examination of publishing in and about San Francisco, the 6 Gallery reading and its aftermath, the textual construction of the poem, the poem as a “Secret history of the Beat Generation” (129), and its obscenity trial. This layered approach not only provides engaging new takes on Beat works but also reveals how Beat representations [End Page 807] are in dialogue with the contingencies of the postwar moment. At the same time, Belletto’s range is usefully broad. Readers are provided revealing discussions of classics such as On the Road and Naked Lunch but are likewise treated to analyses of seldom-discussed little magazines such as the parodic Sinking Bear, as well as important but unfortunately overlooked Beat authors such as Kay Johnson. Belletto includes those whose literary output was meager but who were nevertheless Beat figures worthy of attention and critical discussion. Though necessarily wide-ranging given its aim, the work could use more of a roadmap at times. Nevertheless, coupling interesting close reads with helpful contextualization makes for illuminating reading. Belletto’s approach has numerous advantages, not the least of which is that it allows him to sidestep problems that often plague other treatments of the Beats. Because of the confessional nature of their work and their...

On Webbed Monsters, Revolutionary Activists and Plutonium Glow: Eco-Crisis in Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman

Though green readings of Beat works are a relatively new phenomenon, the Beat aesthetic easily meets Lawrence Buell’s criteria for ecocritical texts. Indeed, many writers associated with the Beat movement, such as Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman, often use their work to give shape to environmental concerns. This article studies the development of a green poetics in the work of both di Prima and Waldman. Focusing on works spanning four decades including Revolutionary Letters (1971), Loba (1998), Uh Oh Plutonium (1982) or The Iovis Trilogy (2011), to name a few, the article analyzes the poets’ use of utopian and dystopian images through which they develop a poetics of eco-crisis that opposes the conformism and political tension of the American postwar and its aftermath.

NATURE, INACTION AND ILLUSION: THE INFLUENCE OF TAOISM ON AMERICAN POETRY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

<p>Taoism is one of the most fundamental thoughts in China, and Laozi’s Taoist theory is even more brilliant, shining through the entire history of Chinese culture. Taoist culture and thoughts through translation have influenced American poetry directly or indirectly. Tao Te Ching (also Laozi) has become the most widely translated Chinese classic in history with the largest circulation overseas. Moreover, its translation has become second only to the Bible. At present, most scholars tend to comment on its translations, and there are few researches on the influence of Taoist thoughts after translation. Therefore, this paper intends to focus on the influences of Taoism on American poetry after translation. The study is based on three major cultural movements in the 20th century in the United States: the New Poetry Movement, the Beat Movement and the Deep Imagist Movement, taking typical poems in these movements as the research objects. The study intends to illustrate the great influences of Taoism on the three cultural movements in the 20th century in the United States by means of close reading, comparative analysis from the perspective of diachronic research. It first introduces the three American movements briefly, enumerates the poets who absorbed Taoist ideas in the movements, and then explains specifically what thoughts they absorbed from Taoism through the comparative analysis between the original Taoist thoughts and the thoughts in American poet’s poetry. It demonstrated in detail that American poets absorbed Taoist thoughts that have an impact on their poetry writing as poets. During the New Poetry Movement, the poets advocated the Taoists view of nature. During the Beat Movement, they paid close attention to the view of “inaction”, while the poets of the Deep Image Group concentrated on the illusion under the view of “homogeneous things”, which promoted the diversified development of American poetry.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0620/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Prey capture analyses in the carnivorous aquatic waterwheel plant (Aldrovanda vesiculosa L., Droseraceae)

We investigated the predator-prey interactions between an Australian ecotype of the carnivorous waterwheel plant (Aldrovanda vesiculosa, Droseraceae) and its potential natural prey, the water flea Daphnia longicephala (Daphniidae), which also occurs in Australia. A. vesiculosa develops snap-traps, which close within ~10–100 ms after mechanical triggering by zooplankton prey. Prey capture attempts (PCAs) were recorded via high-speed cinematography in the laboratory. From 14 recorded PCAs, nine were successful for the plant (the prey was caught), and five were unsuccessful (prey could escape), resulting in a capture rate of ~64%. The prey animals’ locomotion behaviour (antenna beat frequency and movement type) in trap vicinity or inside the open traps is very variable. Traps were mainly triggered with the second antennae. During trap closure, the animals moved only very little actively. A flight response in reaction to an initiated trap closure was not observed. However, several animals could escape, either by having a “lucky” starting position already outside the triggered trap, by freeing themselves after trap closure, or by being pressed out by the closing trap lobes. According to our observations in the successful PCAs, we hypothesize that the convex curvature of the two trap lobes (as seen from the outside) and the infolded trap rims are structural means supporting the capture and retention of prey. Our results are discussed in a broader biological context and promising aspects for future studies are proposed.

Of nomadology: A requiem for India(n-ness)1

Despite the statist imagination of the ‘nomad’ pitted against an overtly instrumental understanding of space, ‘modern’ techniques of statist demographic control, and increasing surveillance on mobility, the trope of nomadology in the context of India often characterizes ‘the return of the repressed’. The Buddhists in the Ancient, the Bhakti–Sufi practitioners in the Medieval, and certain anti-imperialist ideologues in the Modern have perpetually latched on to the trope to articulate political dissidence. Thinking in these terms, the invocation of nomadology in Critical Theory – by Deleuze and Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, Michel de Certeau and Edward Said, among others – alluding to non-conformity, non-linearity and political subversion, has an intellectual history that is often purportedly grounded onto ‘India’. My article will explore how the dichotomy between the ‘good’ wanderer and the ‘bad’ wanderer in the ‘Indian tradition’ was premised upon a highly contingent process of religio-political partisanship and struggles over territorialization. Using the nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse on the Romani community and the Beats’ obsession with ‘India’ (cf. the Beat Movement) as case studies, this article, from the postcolonial vantage point, demonstrates how the impulse to assume nomadology as characteristic of ‘India(n-ness)’ – to have perpetually existed in the ‘Indian’ cultural repertoire – is symbolic of an ahistorical and essentialist notion of ‘India’.

The Beat Generation Meets the Hungry Generation: U.S.—Calcutta Networks and the 1960s “Revolt of the Personal”

This essay explores the relationship between the U.S.-based Beat literary movement and the Hungry Generation literary movement centered in and around Calcutta, India, in the early 1960s. It discusses a trip Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky took to India in 1962, where they met writers associated with the Hungry Generation. It further explains how Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books in San Francisco, was inspired to start a new literary magazine, City Lights Journal, by Ginsberg’s letters from India, which included work by Hungry Generation writers. The essay shows how City Lights Journal packaged the Hungry Generation writers as the Indian wing of the Beat movement, and focuses in particular on the work of Malay Roy Choudhury, the founder of the Hungry Generation who had been prosecuted for obscenity for his poem “Stark Electric Jesus”. The essay emphasizes in particular the close relationship between aesthetics and politics in Hungry Generation writing, and suggests that Ginsberg’s own mid-1960s turn to political activism via the imagination is reminiscent of strategies employed by Hungry Generation writers.

Satori in Brittany: Jack Kerouac, Youenn Gwernig, and the Breton Beat Novel

In 1966, eight years after On the Road first appeared, Jack Kerouac published an autobiographical novella, Satori in Paris, based on a journey he took to France. The purpose of his trip, Kerouac writes, was the search for his “ancestors’ home town” (Satori 42). Originally from a French-Canadian community in Massachusetts and a native French speaker, Kerouac narrates in Satori in Paris an attempted return to his roots. Ultimately unable to locate the ancestral Breton home, however, the narrator finds satori, or enlightenment, elsewhere. As Hassan Melehy has argued, the impossibility of reconnecting with ancestry illustrates the “failure of rootedness” itself (150).Recent scholarship examines Kerouac’s multilingualism and the thematics of roots, exile, and displacement which permeate his fictional work. In this article, I focus on the intersection of Kerouac’s work and Youenn Gwernig’s 1982 Breton novel, La Grande Tribu. Kerouac was, for Gwernig, both a literary model and a friend. This article argues that La Grande Tribu inscribes the narrative of Breton cultural and geographic exile in the aesthetics of the Beat movement and, in doing so, provides transnational resonance to the crisis of Breton identity in the late twentieth century.

Pulling Down the Sky: Envisioning the Apocalypse with Keith Haring and William S. Burroughs

Pulling Down the Sky: Envisioning the Apocalypse with Keith Haring and William S. Burroughs Lynn R. Huber Midway through Apocalypse by Keith Haring (1958‐1990) and William S. Burroughs (1914‐1997), an anonymous narrator tells John, the seer and author of the Book of Revelation, “don't bother…with all that junk” because “it's time.” Capturing the urgency of apocalyptic discourse, this 1988 collaboration, which includes ten prints by Haring and poetry by Burroughs, reverses the apocalyptic trajectory of its apparent, albeit distant, source text, Revelation. In lieu of depicting a recognizably male John being taken into heaven (Rev 4:1), Haring illustrates a hybrid woman/machine pulling down a tangled tape‐like sky. Burroughs writes: “Caught—burn—in New York beneath the animals of the village—with madness—the Piper pulled down the sky.” Through image and text these two artists queer the perspective of Revelation, replacing the otherworldly vantage point of apocalyptic with an earthly view, specifically from Greenwich Village, a center of queer culture in the 1980s. With this shift of perspective, we glimpse in the pages of this slim book both a queering of the ancient Book of Revelation, written in the first‐century CE, and a queer “revelation.” This queering of the text, which disorients Revelation's narrative and symbols, involves a critique of phallo‐centric culture, embodied in white, middle‐class religiosity. Moreover, rather than depicting John the Seer as an authority whose visionary account cannot be altered or amended (Rev 22:18‐19), Haring and Burroughs offer an ambivalent eschatology, vacillating between end‐time hope and anti‐social negativity. Engaging apocalypse queerly Not known for their subtly, Haring, whose pop art style captured the spirit of the late 1980s, and Burroughs, a founding figure of the 1960's Beat movement, borrow the title Apocalypse directly from the Book of Revelation, an apocalypse written in the late first‐century CE and the final book of the Christian Bible. The ancient text begins with the Greek word apokalypsis or “apocalypse,” when transliterated into English. “Apocalypse” serves as the text's title and is traditionally translated as “revelation.” Apocalypse also becomes a designation for a genre of literature for which Revelation is often thought of as a model. By adopting this title, Haring and Burroughs signal that their project revisions the canonical text. Biblical scholar Vincent L. Wimbush describes this type of appropriation as “signifying on” the text, a practice in which conventional and socially powerful scripts are leveraged, especially by those outside of the dominant culture, to address new contexts and create new meanings. There are a variety of reasons why interpreters signify on scripture, although the practice often involves using texts that have shaped a community's identity, for good or ill, to challenge and reimagine that identity. Through the practices of signification new scriptural traditions emerge, a phenomenon that Wimbush terms “scripturalization.” Focusing on African American biblical interpretation, Lynne St. Clair Darden explains that even scholarly analyses of texts function as scripturalization. This seems especially true when the scholar understands herself as a “carrier of cultural memory,” a process that entails both “looking (and talking) back while moving forward, reshaping identity construction and in so doing reshaping the discipline itself.” In other words, as a queer identified biblical scholar and as someone invested in queer cultural memory, my reading of Haring and Burroughs’ signification on Revelation makes me as much of a “scribe,” to use Darden's language, as Haring, Burroughs, and even John. By exploring Apocalypse as a scripturalization of Revelation in this essay, I effectively extend the queer canon, the ever‐shifting collection of texts and traditions with which queer communities engage. Making this claim is not intended to be an act of hubris; rather, it is an acknowledgment that I am embedded within an interpretive community and a recognition that my decision to engage Haring and Burroughs’ work is motivated by a sense of shared community with other queer readers of Revelation. The understanding of Haring and Burroughs as part of a queer community coalesces around a shared subversive affect, a “queer” posture toward social norms, especially vis‐à‐vis sexuality. Even before the emergence of the academic field of...

Deborah R. Geis, ed., Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the “Howl” Generation

Deborah R. Geis’s expansive essay collection, Beat Drama, takes a generous and inclusive approach to its analysis of Beat plays and performances. A key benefit of the book is the range and diversity of artists covered, yet it also reproduces a sense of canonical precedence for certain figures in the Beat movement.

Photography from the Inside Out: Robert Frank's Memorial Images

Photography from the Inside Out:Robert Frank's Memorial Images Benjamin Pollak (bio) Everything he does is personal, and comes from the inside out. —Rudolph Wurlitzer1 In the early 1970s, just years after announcing that "photography was in [his] past," Robert Frank began to produce and exhibit still photographs again.2 Nothing in Frank's early career as a documentary photographer could have prepared viewers for the nakedly autobiographical, visually experimental images he began to make after his return to the medium. Confronted with the new turn in Frank's work, critics responded with perplexed silence or a dismissive shrug, even as they spoke of his early work in tones of increasing reverence. When Nicholas Dawidoff profiled Frank for the New York Times Magazine in July 2015, for instance, he devoted a scant 30 words of the approximately 8,300-word profile to Frank's photography after The Americans (1958)—an imbalance that is characteristic of both popular and scholarly assessments of Frank's work and legacy.3 With the exception of celebratory essays published in exhibition catalogs, the occasional blog post, and a few scattered essays in small journals, Frank's photography from the 1970s onward—what I will refer to here as his "later work"—continues to be treated as a minor footnote to the early images that earned him a reputation as "[o]ne of the most-cited figures in twentieth century photography" and "the most influential photographer alive."4 Frank's turn away from still photography directly followed the publication of The Americans, a book widely considered one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century photography.5 Published in France in 1958 and in the United States the following year, the volume of eighty-three grainy 35-mm prints shocked viewers with its unconventional, seemingly unstudied compositions and its critical depiction of a nation riven [End Page 27] by prejudice and inequality in the midst of material abundance.6 After an initially icy reception, The Americans achieved cult status in the 1960s, skyrocketing Frank to international fame and making him one of the towering figures in postwar photography, even as Frank himself embraced the relative obscurity of underground filmmaking. In 1959, he collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Alfred Leslie, and other friends to make the short film Pull My Daisy, which became a classic of the Beat movement. Frank would spend the next decade working as an independent filmmaker, his efforts after Pull My Daisy attracting little attention, even as the reputation of The Americans continued its vertiginous ascent. The story of The Americans' rise from obscurity to international fame, dramatized by news of Frank's sudden renunciation of photography, has contributed to what W. J. T. Mitchell has called the "mythical status" of both Frank and his most famous work. "If The Americans is the great tragic poem of American photography," Mitchell writes, "Frank seems to play the role of its tragic hero, a kind of Oedipus who 'had eyes' that saw something so terrible and shocking that he felt compelled to put them out, to put his camera in a closet."7 This narrative is so seductive—so surprising and seemingly perverse a story—that it has largely obscured Frank's subsequent return to the medium at the beginning of the 1970s, leading critics to overlook the affective power and formal innovation of the rich, if uneven, body of work he produced over the subsequent four and a half decades.8 In the pages that follow, I explore the startling direction Frank's work took after his return to photography, paying particular attention to his exploration of the relationship between photography and writing. More specifically, I focus on his attempts to use forms of visual sequence, collage, and abstraction to expand the representational capacities of photography by bringing it closer to the formal, expressive conditions of writing, which he saw as a more effective vehicle for self-reflection and subjective expression. After 1971, Frank began to develop a fragmentary, increasingly abstract collage aesthetic that was both more confessional and less mimetic than his more famous documentary photographs. As my reading of these images suggests, his early turn away from photography—as well as...

Allen Ginsberg’s Blake Vision

Allen Ginsberg famously had an auditory hallucination after reading William Blake’s “Ah Sunflower,” “Little Girl Lost,” and “Sick Rose.” He was at Columbia University when he had this “Blake Vision” in the 1940s. Around this time, he befriended William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac and started a poetic circuit called “New Vision.” Members of this group eventually contributed to the emergence of the Beat movement. The purpose of this paper is to identify the mutual influence of these writers who eventually forged a community and looked for new poetic language and expression. While Ginsberg’s interaction with the San Francisco based poets was real, his attachment with Blake remained imaginary. The paper purports to show how Ginsberg appropriated the Romantic Blake as well as negotiated with an intellectual community in his pursuit of “true art.” In other words, the paper revisits the theme of language, literature and community keeping Blake and Ginsberg at its focus.

The Beats: A Very Short IntroductionDavidSterritt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

The Beats: A Short Introduction David Sterritt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.David Sterritt teaches film at Columbia University. His The Beats is a volume in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series. These slim books are small enough to be slipped into a pocket, and cover hundreds of topics, ranging alphabetically from advertising to writing and script. Sterritt's very short introduction to the Beats is not a mere outline or a puffed up encyclopedia article. He offers a concise but illuminating commentary on the Beat movement. He explores its origins and its effects, providing a rich historical context that reaches back to the American literary renaissance of the 1920s and moves forward to the present day. In doing so, Sterritt convincingly argues that the Beat writers made important contributions to twentieth-century literature.The Beats continued a rich tradition of cultural criticism in American writing. For the most part eschewing overtly political commentary, they focused on the struggle of the individual to find autonomy and redemption in modern mass society. The Beats were the heirs of the literary lost generation that flourished in the years following World War One. The war uprooted the lost generation from the comfortable moral certainties of their parents' Victorian world. In their books, they explored the bleak existential landscape of the new modernist universe. The Beats grew up during the Depression years. World War Two was a formative experience, though the closest that any of them got to the battlefields of the conflict was Jack Kerouac's brief service in the merchant marine. What the trenches were for the lost generation, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were for the Beats. They came of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb. The moral dislocation expressed by the early modernist writers seemed to be confirmed by a world locked into Cold War and threatened with nuclear annihilation. The prosperity of the late 1940s and 1950s was no more a comfort to the Beats than that of the 1920s had been for the lost generation. The Beats rejected the comfortable verities that were promoted in 1950s America. Their works expressed disdain for consumerism and an increasingly corporate culture. They celebrated loners, oddballs, and the marginalized. Perhaps naively, they assumed that authentic insight into life could be grasped by immersing themselves in a frantic bohemia, or grooving to cool jazz, or living amongst the voiceless fellahin of the world. …

The Rising of the Cosmopolitan Personalities

This short essay wants to look at beat literature as a medium that has re-introduced in popular feelings the possibility to change the world, transforming its social rules by using new technologies as instruments for emancipation. Stating this, the essay links the beat movement to hipster’s hopes of the beginning of the XX century, with the need to reflect on the meaning of two WW as barriers to people’s emancipation. From the non-academic side of the perspective, the essay indicates some special sources, trying to demonstrate how beat literature has shaped new meanings to words like “occult”, “magic”, linking them with other words like “awareness” and “emancipation”. Doing this, a tribute is given to the historical role played by the magazine “International Times” as living witness of the years when beat literature was germinating into the generational protest. The conclusions are oriented towards the meaning in the present for a beat attitude to (social) life, with the new awareness of the way indicated by Allen Ginzberg about the unuseful dimension of drugs as instruments to get the vision, and the need to substitute them with natural tools to be able to extract them from unconscious through yoga and meditation systems. This may help to create a new kind of people, involved in a cosmopolitan interpretation of life, able to interconnect by the new information and communication technologies, ready to create a new social intellect. Of course, we do not pretend to present this work of network as a strong link, rather, it seems to be a weak tie. Nevertheless, this weak tie in sociology is a concept used to indicate a relationship that is not as strong as quotidian family or professional relationships. The strength of weak ties theory affirms that weak ties provide access to new audiences where you could find opportunities or contrary opinions that would make ideas stronger, looking at how a person’s network can contribute to their success. Ideas are like germs and they don’t diffuse through populations of people at random, instead, they make their way through networks – that is the kind of relationships we may have with people, creating connections with others. The changes in communication system (Internet, on the immaterial side, the mobility system on the physical side) are creating new opportunities to create network both on the immaterial and on the physical side. Conference driven by intellectual affinities and wishes to know better each others culture seems to generate the conditions of a new kind of people, creating cosmopolitan attitude as something that can be shared by an increasing number of people.

Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature, and the Beat Movement PaulClements. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature, and Beat Movement Paul Clements. New York: Routledge, 2013.Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature, and Beat Movement part of Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature series. The depth Clements plunges into topic of Bukowski (1920-1994) breathtaking, especially for an inexperienced diver. The author does not attempt to pigeonhole Bukowski by reading him in one theory or even by one theory alone, rather the book a take (or collection of takes) rather than a definitive account, an eclectic postmodern approach which attempts to eke out meanings employing cultural, historical, literary, political, psychological and sociological methods of investigation, introducing an array of theories and (2). Clements's introduction offers an overview of Bukowski man, which important in understanding Bukowski writer: Charles Bukowski championed underdog and was one of them. His themes centered on his own foibles and faults, his experiences with addiction, poverty, love and violence.In next two chapters, as art-art as life and the Clements lays out foundation upon which we will come to understand Bukowski and Beat writers before exploring specific examples of his work. During Bukowski's formative years, social realism was finding popularity among American writers. Authors, artists, and musicians scrabbled to show world its true nature: poverty, repression, brutality. Bukowski carried torch of this gritty realism into his own writing, though dropping noir and romance that marked work of predecessors such as John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Through analysis of specific short story Life of a Bum, poem Flophouse, and novel Post Office, author explores harsh realism of Bukowski's writing, Bukowski himself, and his relationship to and with Beat writers. His writing was bleak whereas Beats, like Kerouac, offered hope. Bukowski was not interested in hope or rebellion but in painting world in which he lived and witnessing it as it was.Chapter 4 explores Bukowski and Beat mythology. Clements evaluates him in relation to Beat writers. He is positioned as apolitical beat outsider or antibeat, although heavily influenced by beat writers and William Burroughs, in particular (67). Exploring important Beat writers Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others, Clements examines cultural imperialism, gender, and ethnicity issues in Bukowski's writing and reveals his influences as well as his jealousies of Beat writers and their fame.In chapter 5, Clements discusses Charles Bukowski as an outsider. …

Dharma Bums: The Beat Generation and the Making of Countercultural Pilgrimage

Dharma Bums: The Beat Generation and the Making of Countercultural Pilgrimage P. J. Johnston I believe in the sweetness of Jesus And Buddha— I believe, In St. Francis, Avaloki Tesvara, the Saints Of First Century India A D And Scholars Santidevan And Otherwise Santayanan Everywhere. (Kerouac 1959: 15) Preliminary Polemics “PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously.” —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary 2007: 133 As Beat commentator Stephen Prothero describes in his article “On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest” (1991), the Beats and their pilgrimages have most emphatically not been taken seriously. Both critics and scholars have been unkind to members of the Beat generation, and this unkindness has manifested itself in relative neglect of the Beats in all possible aspects of scholarly investigation. But nowhere does this appear more pronounced than in the area of Beat religion. Though some recent scholarship has been picking up from this earlier neglect and it is now [End Page 165] possible to find serious biographies of most of the major Beat writers and some belated attention to the movement as a literary phenomenon, the only book-length treatment of Beat Buddhism I was able to locate (Tonkinson 1995) hardly qualifies as a scholarly work and was published not by an academic press but as a special feature of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Prothero hypothesizes that this is because of the movement’s reputation as rebellious and antinomian—in its heyday the movement was characterized in identical unsavory terms by publications representing interests as diverse as Life and Playboy, with the latter describing the Beats as “nihilists” and the former claiming that the Beats were at war with “Mom, Dad, Politics, Marriage, the Savings Bank, Organized Religion, Literary Elegance, Law, the Ivy League Suit and Higher Education, to say nothing of the Automatic Dishwasher, the Cellophane-wrapped Soda Cracker, the Split-Level House and the clean, or peace-provoking H-bomb” (Prothero 1991: 206). Norman Podhoretz of Partisan Review went further still, claiming that the Beats were “hostile to civilization” and that the movement as a whole amounted to “a revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and crippled of soul” and “an affirmation of death” (ibid., 206). One couldn’t ask for a more passionate disavowal of the Beats or a more thorough polemic that the movement was profoundly antireligious. This could not contrast more with the Beats’ representation of their movement and its aims, with Jack Kerouac going so far as to reinterpret the crucial term “Beat” (a term for someone down and out originally borrowed from criminal street jive) as a noun derived from the adjective “beatific,” a specifically religious term familiar from such phrases as “the beatific vision” (ibid., 206–207). Several of the representative Beat writers were practicing Buddhists, influencing the entire movement to such an extent that Buddhist ideas and imagery suffused Beat literature as a whole. Ginsberg and Kerouac especially emphasized the positive and constructive elements of their spiritual vision, arguing that literature such as On the Road and Howl should be understood as religious affirmations of what is good and holy rather than as purely critical undertakings: “For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out” (ibid., 206–207). Or, as Allen Ginsberg put it less lyrically (and rather more bluntly): “Howl is an ‘Affirmation’ by individual experience of God, sex, drugs, and absurdity . . . the poems are religious and I meant them to be” (ibid., 207). But for the most part, Beat asseverations in no way diminished scholarly wariness about the Beat movement and its spirituality—as Prothero concludes, “the tendency among literary scholars is to see these [religious] concerns as tangential rather than constitutive” while “historians of American religion who have explored beat spirituality have tended to focus almost exclusively on the beats’ engagement with Zen and then to dismiss that engagement as haphazard” (ibid., 207). It is my contention that the mainstream scholarly neglect of Beat spirituality is in some part...