Beat Generation

An interdisciplinary exploration of the Beat Generation, its intersections with mainstream & experimental film & the interactions of all of these with American society & the culture of the 1950s.

Few eras in U.S. history have begun with more optimistic promise and ended in more pessimistic despair than the 1960s. When J.F.K. became president in 1960, the U.S. was the hope of the world. Ten years later American power abroad seemed wasted in the jungles of Indochina, and critics at home wondered whether the U.S. was really the "land of the free and the home of the brave." This book takes an encyclopedic look at the decade--at the individuals who shaped the era, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the youth rebellion. It covers the political, military, social, cultural, religious, economic, and diplomatic topics that made the 1960s a unique decade in U.S. history.

"These 31 essays... interrogate, dismantle, and ultimately reassemble the history of poetry in the United States. An essential volume that shows how poetry intersects with our lives and vice versa." -- Library Journal

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism - the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity.

Roger Kimball shows how the 'cultural revolution' of the 1960s and '70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and in our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change "cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals", he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other 'cultural revolutionaries' who made their mark. For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke today's 'culture wars'. This book fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.

A work of bold cultural and historical criticism that shows how Allen Ginsberg transformed the American literary tradition in poetry with his own individual talent and created "Howl," a work of genius that defined and shaped a generation and helped to break the Cold War culture of conformity.

Through careful analysis of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Omar Swartz sets out to show that Kerouac's influence on American society is largely rhetorical. Kerouac's significance as a cultural icon can be best understood, Swartz asserts, in terms of traditional rhetorical practices and principles.

To Swartz, Kerouac is a rhetor who symbolically reconstructs his world and offers arguments and encouragements for others to follow. Swartz proposes that On the Road constitutes a "rhetorical vision", a reality-defining discourse suggesting alternative possibilities for growth and change. Embodied in this rhetorical vision are symbolically suited desires that have the power to transform images of self, society, and other.

To explain Kerouac's methods, Swartz adopts Ernest Bormann's "fantasy theme analysis", a method that critics can use to understand the cultural dimension of a text. Because rhetorical visions involve large, encompassing narratives, a fantasy theme analysis is a localized way to establish "meaning" in a text. Thus, fantasy theme analysis presents a rhetorical vision in an accessible manner. Swartz is the first critic to apply fantasy theme analysis to a Beat writer.

The rhetorical significance of On the Road demands elaboration for what it can suggest about the future. Kerouac's writing serves as a tool that empowers people to take control of their lives and to reject dominant forces that constrain their thoughts and their actions. This study of Kerouac, then, is a study of rhetorical transformation.

Celebrating the margins of experience and the intensity of life, Kerouac helped develop the commitment and attitude of a larger American culture that was beginning tostruggle with the tensions and contradictions of society. Through the aid of a focused narrative that graphically names and illustrates these tensions and contradictions, Swartz asserts, the reader of Kerouac's On the Road becomes