Beat Generation

"The Philosophy and Non-Philosophy of Potato Salad"

by f. scott scribner

This is a page proof preview for an article which will appear in the following edited collection: The Philosophy of the Beats, Ed., Sharin Elkoly, The University of Kentucky Press, 2012 (forthcoming).

Through a meditation on the discursive limits of the discipline of philosophy itself, as a microcosm of the very motor... more Through a meditation on the discursive limits of the discipline of philosophy itself, as a microcosm of the very motor of Western culture, this essay looks at the intimate dynamic between tradition and defiance, philosophy and non-philosophy, to assess the extent to which the experiential and performative acts of the beat generation can be said to be recoupable by the tradition and thus can be said to be a philosophy at all.

TALK/DRAFT:“Bowles, the Beats, and 'Fellaheen Orientalism’”(UCSC, February 4, 2011, “Paul Bowles at 100: A Celebration of Multi-Artistry”).

by Rob Wilson

Tagging the Neuronal Entrainment to Beat and Meter

by André Mouraux

Nozaradan S, Peretz I, Missal M, Mouraux A. J Neurosci (2011); 31(28): 10234-40.

Feeling the beat and meter is fundamental to the experience of music. However, how these periodicities are represented... more Feeling the beat and meter is fundamental to the experience of music. However, how these periodicities are represented in the brain remains largely unknown. Here, we test whether this function emerges from the entrainment of neurons resonating to the beat and meter. We recorded the electroencephalogram while participants listened to a musical beat and imagined a binary or a ternary meter on this beat (i.e., a march or a waltz). We found that the beat elicits a sustained periodic EEG response tuned to the beat frequency. Most importantly, we found that meter imagery elicits an additional frequency tuned to the corresponding metric interpretation of this beat. These results provide compelling evidence that neural entrainment to beat and meter can be captured directly in the electroencephalogram. More generally, our results suggest that music constitutes a unique context to explore entrainment phenomena in dynamic cognitive processing at the level of neural networks.

The Clown as Social Critic: Kerouac's Vision

by Stephen Llano

The Machined Word: The Medium As Message-Concept Transportation Entity

by Gregory O'Toole

O'Toole, Gregory. "The Machined Word." The International Journal of the Arts in Society, Vol 2, No. 3. ISSN 1833-1866. Common Ground Publishing. 2007.

Abstract: In this essay, the foundation is laid out for the basis of a media theory declaration that is an alternative... more Abstract: In this essay, the foundation is laid out for the basis of a media theory declaration that is an alternative view of Marshall McLuhan's mantra that the medium is the message. In the first part of this essay the alternative theory is stated, and holds that the medium is not necessarily the message, but that the medium is a message-concept transportation entity.

The second part of the essay contains the application of the theory, focusing on the process and the invention of the typewriter viewed through the critical lens of Freidrich Kittler, and the literary work of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs to project the applications of the theory stated in part one. The essay utilizes Freidrich Kittler's three-part model of media in perception, including Gramophone, Film, and Typewriter, resulting in a series of more complete and comprehensive musings on the axis of association that can be drawn between medium, message, and author in this respect.

Keywords: Media Studies, Literature, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

Link: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.127.930&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Jack Kerouac Timeline

by Ceren Sengezer

Co-authored with Professor Dick Ellis, published in the Literary Encyclopedia.

TALK/DRAFT:“Bowles, the Beats, and 'Fellaheen Orientalism’”(UCSC, February 4, 2011, “Paul Bowles at 100: A Celebration of Multi-Artistry”).

by Rob Wilson

“An Ephemeral Oddity”?: The Beat Generation and American Culture

by Catherine M Nash

"A New Anarchism Emerges, 1940-1954"

by Andrew Cornell

Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 5:1 (Spring 2011)

Of Tapes, Scrolls, and Truth : Jack Kerouac's Use of Documents in the Making of “On the Road” and “Visions of Cody”

by Charles Scheel

Excerpts from this paper were read at the AFEA 2011 Conference on “La Vérité / Truth and Truth Value” held from 25 to 28 mai 2011 at Université de Brest, France, in a workshop dedicated to the theme “Seeking the truth : American documentary culture”, set up and chaired by Fiona McMahon (Université de Bourgogne) and Anne Ollivier-Mellios (Université Paris 13).

This study describes how Jack Kerouac used unusual documents in a creative way to convey his own idea of fictional... more This study describes how Jack Kerouac used unusual documents in a creative way to convey his own idea of fictional truth and poetic truth, in the early “novels” that constitute the two pillars of his “Duluoz Legend”: On the Road and Visions of Cody.
The first section looks at the document status of “The Original Scroll” and its adaptation into a publishable “novel”: On the Road.
Section 2 describes how Kerouac inserted accurate transcripts of actual tape recordings made in Neal Cassady's San Francisco home in 1951-52, into the complex fabric of his tribute to America, Visions of Cody.
Section 3 ponders Allen Ginsberg's assessment of Visions of Cody and a critical work devoted to Kerouac's particular prose under the caption “action writing”.

Beatitude Golden Anniversary 1959-2009 Edited by Latif Harris and Neeli Cherkovski

by Chad Weidner

William Burroughs: "The Cat Inside"

by Chad Weidner

An entry about William Burroughs' "The Cat Inside"

Ted Joans' surrealist history lesson

by Joanna Pawlik

Pawlik, J. (2011), ‘Ted Joans’ surrealist history lesson’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 14: 1&2, pp. 221–239,

This article argues for the importance of Ted Joans within histories of surrealism, which seldom acknowledge the... more This article argues for the importance of Ted Joans within histories of surrealism, which seldom acknowledge the existence of the movement post-World War II or its participants outside of interwar Paris. Since the early 1960s, Joans contributed to both the Paris and Chicago groups of surrealists, who continued to proclaim the relevance of mad love, the marvellous, and dreams to a radical politics long after the movement was alleged to have deceased. The majority of the article, however, addresses Joans' work composed prior to his formal involvement with surrealism, exploring how his invocation of surrealist influence was framed by a narrative of surrealism's legacy of radical anti-colonialism and anti-racism to diasporic writers, artists and intellectuals such as Etienne Lero and Aime Cesaire. Joans' work self-consciously embeds his engagement with surrealism within a matrix of transatlantic cultural dialogues which dislodge it from its supposed headquarters in Paris in the interwar years, undermines its profile as white, Francophone and bourgeois, and problematizes unilateral models of influence. Drawing on Surrealist aesthetics, his early work deploys modernist formal innovation as a means to reflect on the historiography of modernism, and performatively protests the unequal access to the political and cultural ideals of modernity

VARIOUS KINDS OF MADNESS:”French Nietzscheans Inside America

by Joanna Pawlik

Joanna Pawlik (2006), 'VARIOUS KINDS OF MADNESS: The French Nietzscheans Inside America,' Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives, 3: 2, pp 225 - 244.

Drawing comparisons with the introduction of deconstruction to America and its perceived discontinuity with North... more Drawing comparisons with the introduction of deconstruction to America and its perceived discontinuity with North American intellectual traditions, this paper discusses the arrival of a different strain of poststructuralism in America—the French Nietzscheanism of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Felix Guattari and Jean-Franois Lyotard. It isolates the presence and function of American oppositional discourses, such as the countercultural or anti-psychiatric, within French Nietzscheanism and asserts there exists a more intimate link between these French and American oppositional discourses than is customarily assumed. French Nietzscheanism entered America via the Schizo-culture conference, organized by Sylvere Lotringer in Columbia, 1975. The examination of this neglected, though intriguing event produces a valuable snapshot of the transition that oppositional discourses on both sides of the Atlantic underwent as the sixties gave way to the seventies

Artaud in performance: dissident surrealism and the postwar American literary avant-garde

by Joanna Pawlik

Joanna Pawlik, (2010), 'Artaud in performance: dissident surrealism and the postwar American literary avant-garde,' Papers of Surrealism 8, pp 1 - 21.

This article seeks to give account of the influence of Antonin Artaud on the postwar American literary avant-garde,... more This article seeks to give account of the influence of Antonin Artaud on the postwar American literary avant-garde, paying particular attention to the way in which his work both on and in the theatre informed the Beat and San Francisco writers’ poetics of performance. Artaud was received enthusiastically by poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure, and recruited as a posthumous ally in their distintive revolt against Cold War oppression, militarism, and conformity. They sourced, translated and distributed texts by Artaud during the 1950s and 1960s, ensuring he reached as wide an Anglophone audience as possible.

When bohemia becomes a business: City Lights, Columbus Avenue and the future of San Francisco

by Tara Brabazon

Vol. 5, No. 1, 2011, pp. 43-59

This article offers a study of the now clichéd Bohemian Index. I explore how Richard Florida’s arguments flatten,... more This article offers a study of the now clichéd Bohemian Index. I explore how Richard Florida’s arguments flatten, homogenize and commercialize the radicalism and resistance of the cities validated through his criteria. Activism becomes a brand. San Francisco is important in such research because of its political and literary history, with North Beach’s iconography tethered to the Beat Generation. The best known ‘Left Coast City’ in the world, San Francisco reveals the political paradoxes of creative industries and the city imaging literature. Bohemia creates an attractive city of
coffee and conversation. San Francisco is a diverse economy, with developed service, tourist and hospitality industries. It is facing seismic challenges, as is the home state. In a credit crunch, the economies based around lifestyle capitalism and service industries suffer as international infrastructural and public sector funding retracts. My article proposes no causal relationship between bohemia and economic development through either tourism or the creative industries. Instead, the
complexity of ‘Bohemia’ as a concept, trope and brand is revealed, spilling beyond the seemingly predictable, mappable and trackable Bohemian Index.

Kerouac and America on the Road to Postmodernism

by Cristina Felea

Medusae, Hermaphrodites, and Ball-Cutters: Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest and New Directions for Feminist Narratology

by Kyle Mox

The Brake of Time: Corso's Bomb as Postmodern God(dess)

by Christine Hoff Kraemer

"The Brake of Time: Corso's Bomb as Postmodern God(dess)." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44:2 (Summer 2002): 211-28. Includes illustrations.

Reprinted without illustrations in The Beat Generation: A Gale Critical Companion. Ed. Lynn M. Zott. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2003. 203-213.

Interprets Beat poet Gregory Corso's controversial poem "Bomb" and contextualizes it in religious rather... more Interprets Beat poet Gregory Corso's controversial poem "Bomb" and contextualizes it in religious rather than political terms.

“A Dreary Life on a Barge: From L’Atalante to Young Adam"

by Walter Metz

Published in Weber: The Contemporary West 27.2 [Spring/Summer 2011]. 51-66.

This article compares two cinematic representations of barge life: the uplifting Poetic Realism of Jean Vigo's... more This article compares two cinematic representations of barge life: the uplifting Poetic Realism of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) and the Existential dreariness of David Mackenzie's Young Adam (2003), adapted from the Scottish Beat novel by Alexander Trocchi (1954). What is the relationship between the flow of the barge on the river, and the mechanisms of the cinematic apparatus?