Beat Fiction

Question 1

Beat Generation
Beat Fiction.
Jack Kerouac

Answer 1

• Wild form influenced by Neal Casssady’s inhibited, spontaneous, fast letters.

“Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”
- Object is set before the mind in reality (sketching) and in memory (from image-object).
- Free deviation of mind into limitless blow-on-subject.
- Write “without consciousness” in semi-trance.
- Uninhibited.
- Writing-or-typing cramps.

“On the Road
- Aftermath WWII.
- Symbolize struggle to retain freedom of American dream.
- Rejection of domestic and economic conformity.
- Freer communities + heightened individual experiences
- Search for authenticity in the outcast, the mad, the marginalized…

“Visions of Cody”
- Experimental and spontaneous.
- 1st section: sketches + Keoruc’s internal monologue
- 2nd section: transcription of taped conversations.

Question 2

Beat Generation
Beat Fiction.
William Burroughs

Answer 2

• Represents beat attitude + breaks with romanticized idealism.

Style: from uninflected journalism to sci-fi hallucinations
- Contrast between popular literature and experimentalism.
- Kind of anti-heroic prose.

Question 3

Beat Generation
Beat Fiction.
William Burroughs
“Junkie”
“Queer”
“Naked Lunch”

Answer 3

“Junkie”
- Stylistically conventional, linear narrative.
- Drug novel.
- Autobiographical.
- Middle-class boreedom + dehumanizing individualism.

“Queer”
- 1950s gay novel.
- Homosexual subculture.
- Deep analysis of relationships between drugs and sex.

“Naked Lunch”
- Extremely fragmentary.
- Beat as “beaten”.
- Language as virus.
- “Postmodern” (anticipates antiauthoritarian concerns).
- Flashes of conscience.
- Heroine underworld.
- Sophisticated critique.

Question 4

Beat Generation
Beat Fiction.
Allen Ginsberg

Answer 4

Style:
- Influenced by William Carlos William + Kerouac’s sketching technique.
- Emphasis on natural speech + spontaneous transcription.
- Ellipsis: images flashing through the mind.
- Flashes, units of thought, breath.
- Lots of repetition.
- Very lyrical and epic.
- Reference to popular culture + high modernist style.

Topics: from high-culture to low culture.
- Politics.
- Religion / transcendence.
- Mental instability.
- Consumerism.
- Sexuality and homosexuality
- Vitalism

Question 5

Beat Generation
Beat Fiction.
Allen Ginsberg
“Howl for Carl Solomon”
“Kaddish”

Answer 5

“Howl for Carl Solomon”
- Landmark of freedom of speech in poetry.
- Apocalyptic criticism of dull, properoues Eisenhower years + exuberant celebration of emerging counterculture.
- Breath line.

“Kaddish”