Beat Generation

Question 1

Beat Generation
Beat writers characteristics (7)

Answer 1

• More extreme form of social dissent.
• Influences: jazz, bebop.
• Beat as outsider, outcast.
• Attraction to madness.
• Disaffection and revolt.
• Deviant and outcast as muse.
• Very heterogeneous group, loose boundaries.

Question 2

Beat Generation
Beat Generation influences (4) and traits (5).

Answer 2

Influences:
- Romanticism (Shelley,Blake, Keats)
- Transcendentalism (Thoreau)
- Realism (Whitman)
- Modernism (Pound, Williams, H.D.)

Traits:
- Free sex and instinctual liberation (D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Wilhelm Reich)
- Jazz (bebop): dissonant, fragmented, inventive, difficult…
- Automatic writing, stream of consciousness, fragmentation.
- Liberation of experience in life and literature.
- Interest in mysticism and use of drugs to achieve alternative sensations and perceptions.