Reconstructing the Beats

This collection of scholarly essays reassesses the Beat Generation writers in mid-century American history and literature, as well as their broad cultural impact since the 60s from contemporary critical, theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. The traditional canon of major writers in this generation is expanded to include women and African Americans. The essays offer critiques of media stereotypes and popular cliches that influence both academic and popular discourse about the Beats, connect the literature of the Beat movement to music, painting, and film, and ultimately open new directions for study of the Beats in the 21st century. Front Matter....Pages i-vi Introduction....Pages 1-7 Front Matter....Pages 9-9 “The Sordid Hipsters of America”: Beat Culture and the Folds of Heterogeneity....Pages 11-26 The Transnational Counterculture: Beat-Mexican Intersections....Pages 27-40 “I Want to Be with My Own Kind”: Individual Resistance and Collective Action in the Beat Counterculture....Pages 41-54 Front Matter....Pages 55-55 ruth weiss’s DESERT JOURNAL: A Modern-Beat-Pomo Performance....Pages 57-71 Joanne Kyger, Beat Generation Poet: “a porcupine traveling at the speed of light”....Pages 73-88 Lenore Kandel’s The Love Book: Psychedelic Poetics, Cosmic Erotica, and Sexual Politics in the Mid-sixties Counterculture....Pages 89-104 Black Skins, Beat Masks Bob Kaufman and the Blackness of Jazz....Pages 105-116 Black Beat: Performing Ted Joans....Pages 117-132 Front Matter....Pages 133-133 What Abstract Art Means in Pull My Daisy ....Pages 135-149 Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker, and the Poetics of Beat Improvisation....Pages 151-167 “All things are different appearances of the same emptiness”: Buddhism and Jack Kerouac’s Nature Writings....Pages 169-185 “Will You Please Stop Playing with the Mantra?”: The Embodied Poetics of Ginsberg’s Later Career....Pages 187-202 “Virus-X”: Kerouac’s Visions of Burroughs....Pages 203-215 Back Matter....Pages 217-241 The purpose of this collection of scholarly essays on the Beat Generation writers is to re-vision the Beats from contemporary critical, theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives with the larger goal of opening new directions for study of the Beats in the 21st century. This volume is a collection of essays that collectively seek to re-vision the Beats from contemporary critical, theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives