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Humanities
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Beat Generation Writers as Readers of World Literature
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Beat Generation Writers as Readers of World Literature

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 October 2018) | Viewed by 29462

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Hassan Melehy

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Romance Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill CB# 3170, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3170, USA
Interests: European renaissance; poetics; philosophy and literature; critical theory; film studies; North American literature

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Scholarship increasingly recognizes the Beat Generation as far more than a movement restricted to the US. One of the reasons for worldwide interest in their work is that they understood literature as a global phenomenon: besides that they were well read in American and British literature, their own interests extended to the literatures of multiple European countries, North Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Although there is a long-standing tradition of characterizing their knowledge as meager and superficial, and their curiosity especially about non-Euro-American cultures as exoticizing and appropriative, recent research shows deeper, more sophisticated, more receptive engagements.

This special issue of Humanities seeks to explore the ways that Beat Generation writers read world literature and incorporated what they learned from it in their own writing. In this context, “literature” is broadly understood as also including philosophical texts, religious texts, and religious practices. Submissions on how Beat Generation writers contributed to the idea of literature as a global phenomenon are especially welcome.

Please submit articles of up to 8,000 words to Hassan Melehy ([email protected]) by 15 October 2018. Queries welcome.

Prof. Dr. Hassan Melehy
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Beat Generation
  • Geographic Extensions
  • Transnational Beat Generation
  • Beat Generation Influence
  • Beat Generation Legacy
  • Beat Generation Literature

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 827 KiB  
Article
The Glorious Plagiarism, Trash Aesthetics, and Ecological Entropy of Cryptic Cut-Ups from Minutes to Go
by Chad Weidner
Humanities 2019, 8(2), 116; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020116 - 21 Jun 2019
Viewed by 3571
Abstract
This paper examines some of the many ways in which example early cut-ups from Minutes to Go recall canonical literary forms, revive the revolutionary destructive urgency of Dada aesthetics, as well as contribute to wider environmental concerns. How do unusual examples of radically [...] Read more.
This paper examines some of the many ways in which example early cut-ups from Minutes to Go recall canonical literary forms, revive the revolutionary destructive urgency of Dada aesthetics, as well as contribute to wider environmental concerns. How do unusual examples of radically experimental literature contribute to how people think about the environment? What can additional consideration of the cut-up manifesto Minutes to Go tell us about the relationship between culture and nature? This paper suggests that unstudied examples of cryptic cut-ups from Minutes to Go participate in cultural recycling through the Glorious Plagiarism of canonical texts, and what emerges from the Dada Compost Grinder is a trash aesthetic that highlights the voids of both consumer and material culture. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Beat Generation Writers as Readers of World Literature)
14 pages, 267 KiB  
Article
Genius and Genitality: William S. Burroughs Reading Wilhelm Reich
by Thomas Antonic
Humanities 2019, 8(2), 101; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020101 - 21 May 2019
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 7053
Abstract
This article explores the impact of Wilhelm Reich’s theories and writings on the works and thinking of William S. Burroughs. Reich’s significance for Burroughs’ fiction is beyond doubt, as the appearance of Reich’s discoveries and inventions, such as orgones and orgone accumulators, in [...] Read more.
This article explores the impact of Wilhelm Reich’s theories and writings on the works and thinking of William S. Burroughs. Reich’s significance for Burroughs’ fiction is beyond doubt, as the appearance of Reich’s discoveries and inventions, such as orgones and orgone accumulators, in Burroughs’ major works demonstrates. Yet to date, no attempt has been made in academia to make all those references to Reich in Burroughs’ complete œuvre visible. In order to make the thinking of the Austrian-American psychoanalyst and scientist comprehensible for readers not familiar with Reich, the first section will provide a brief biographical outline. In the subsequent sections, the article will describe how Burroughs and other Beat writers discovered Reich, how and to what extent Burroughs incorporated Reich in his texts throughout his career and what opinions Burroughs expressed about Reich in interviews and letters. For the first time, with a summary as undertaken in this article and by documenting most of the references to Reich in Burroughs’ work, the importance of the former to the latter is revealed in a compact form. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Beat Generation Writers as Readers of World Literature)
16 pages, 279 KiB  
Article
The Beat Generation Meets the Hungry Generation: U.S.—Calcutta Networks and the 1960s “Revolt of the Personal”
by Steven Belletto
Humanities 2019, 8(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010003 - 2 Jan 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 7444
Abstract
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 [...] Read more.
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. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Beat Generation Writers as Readers of World Literature)
17 pages, 305 KiB  
Article
Intertextuality in Diane di Prima’s Loba: Religious Discourse and Feminism
by Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo
Humanities 2018, 7(4), 132; https://doi.org/10.3390/h7040132 - 16 Dec 2018
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5096
Abstract
The last three decades have witnessed a significant increase in the academic interest in the Beat Generation. No longer seen as “know-nothing bohemians” (Podhoretz 1958), scholars have extended the scope of Beat studies, either by generating renewed interest in canonical authors, by expanding [...] Read more.
The last three decades have witnessed a significant increase in the academic interest in the Beat Generation. No longer seen as “know-nothing bohemians” (Podhoretz 1958), scholars have extended the scope of Beat studies, either by generating renewed interest in canonical authors, by expanding the understanding of what Beat means, or by broadening the aesthetic or theoretical lens through which we read Beat writers and poets. Among these, the transnational perspective on Beat writing has sparked careful re-examinations of Beat authors and their works that seek to recognize, among other things, the impact that transnational cultures and literatures have had on Beat writers. Diane di Prima’s long poem Loba (Di Prima 1998), a feminist epic the poet started writing in the early 1970s, draws on a vast array of transnational texts and influences. Most notoriously, di Prima works with mythological and religious texts to revise and challenge the representation of women throughout history. This paper explores di Prima’s particular use of world narratives in light of a feminist poetics and politics of revision. Through the example of “Eve” and the “Virgin Mary”, two of the many female characters whose textual representation is challenged in Loba, the first part of the paper considers di Prima’s use of gnostic and Christian discourses and their impact on her feminist politics of revision. The second part of the paper situates Loba in the specific context of Second-Wave feminism and the rise of Goddess Movement feminist groups. Drawing from the previous analysis, this part reevaluates di Prima’s collection in light of the essentialist debate that analyzes the texts arising from this tradition as naïve and apolitical. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Beat Generation Writers as Readers of World Literature)
12 pages, 218 KiB  
Article
Projective Verse: The Spiritual Legacy of the Beat Generation
by Paul E. Nelson
Humanities 2018, 7(4), 102; https://doi.org/10.3390/h7040102 - 22 Oct 2018
Viewed by 5158
Abstract
Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, poetics or cultural activism; Jack Kerouac’s prose, poetry and his method of composition; Gary Snyder’s environmental and Buddhist consciousness and bioregional ethos, or the opening made by the Beats for Eastern spirituality in the west are of intrinsic value and [...] Read more.
Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, poetics or cultural activism; Jack Kerouac’s prose, poetry and his method of composition; Gary Snyder’s environmental and Buddhist consciousness and bioregional ethos, or the opening made by the Beats for Eastern spirituality in the west are of intrinsic value and will be for generations, this paper seeks to posit that it is Michael McClure’s use of Projective Verse, that future generations of writers and readers will come to appreciate as that movement’s spiritual legacy. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Beat Generation Writers as Readers of World Literature)
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