The Beat Generation
Alberto Quiñonez
Alejandro Rodriguez Lara
• The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired
• Central elements of "Beat" culture included experimentation with drugs, alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and the idealizing of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being.
The best known examples of beat literature.
• Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956)
• William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959)
• Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957)
• Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York. The name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes. The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or "beaten down"
Influences
• Romanticism• Early American sources• French Surrealism• Modernism:Though the Beat aesthetic posited itself
against T. S. Eliot's creed of strict objectivity and literary modernism's new classicism, certain modernist poets were major influences on the Beats, includingEzra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and H.D.. Pound was specifically important to Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.
Influences on the Western Culture
• In 1982, Ginsberg published a summary of "the essential effects" of the Beat Generation:
• Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.
• Liberation of the world from censorship.• Demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis and
other drugs.• The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art
form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works.
• Jack Kerouac (wrote), Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie (directed) Pull My Daisy (1958)
• Heart Beat (1980)• Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams (directed) Whatever
Happened To Kerouac? (1986) Documentary.• David Cronenberg (wrote and directed) Naked Lunch (1991)• Chuck Workman (wrote and directed) The Source (1999)• Gary Walkow (wrote and directed) Beat (2000)• Allen Ginsberg Live in London (1995)• Howl (2010)
• HOWL• by Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,