College Literature articles from January 2000

College Literature archives from January 2000

Introduction: The Unspeakable Visions of the Individual in Academe.
January 1, 2000... At the end of the twentieth century, teachers of Beat Literature can draw upon a wealth of critical resources that have largely been published within the last twenty years. Indeed, the outpouring of scholarly publications about the Beats in the...

"Telepathic Shock and Meaning Excitement": Kerouac's Poetics of Intimacy.
January 1, 2000... Explaining the special nature of his friendship with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg said that early in their relationship he realized that, "If I actually confessed the secret tendencies of my soul, he would understand nakedly who I was" (Watson...

"You're putting me on": Jack Kerouac and the Postmodern Emergence [1].
January 1, 2000... Of the triumvirate of principal male Beat writers--Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac-Kerouac's literary historical significance and artistic achievement remain underestimated. This is so in part because his writing has been...

A White Man in Love: A Study of Race, Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, and Tristessa.
January 1, 2000... Jack Kerouac is generally not thought of as a writer of love stories, his name more readily evoking images of jazz, poetry, Buddhism, the boy gang, and cars zooming along the omnipresent road. But a considerable portion of his Duluoz legend is...

"Word Begets Image and Image Is Virus": Undermining Language and Film in the Works of William S. Burroughs.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... An essential feature of the Western control machine is to make language as non-pictorial as possible, to separate words as far as possible from objects or observable processes. (Burroughs and Odier 1989) I can feel a probing insect...

Intersection Points: Teaching William Burroughs's Naked Lunch.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... The experimental novels of William S. Burroughs, including his most famous work, Naked Lunch, are rarely taught to students of any level, for two related reasons: their relentless scatology and their nonlinear structure. If the former...

Allen Ginsberg's Urban Pastoral.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... Exhibits What does Allen Ginsberg want? The question persists in his poetry, where it has acquired something more of a literary emphasis now that the poet himself is dead. Without insisting too rigidly on the boundary between art and life...

Mountains and Rivers Are Us: Gary Snyder and the Nature of the Nature of Nature.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... Readers familiar with the overall shape and development of Gary Snyder's poetic career--with its geography and evolution, so to speak--are no doubt also aware of the extensive ground occupied by Mountains and Rivers Without End within that...

Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... This essay has three strands: that is, it is "about" three things, and these three things are not autonomous but interwoven; discussion of each illuminates the others. It is about the historical intersection of Beat, gay, and minority...

Chicanismo's Beat Outrider? The Texts and Contexts of Oscar Zeta Acosta.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... I Beats, The Beat Movement. The key names continue to resonate: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Di Prima, Snyder, or Burroughs. Ginsberg's Howl (1956) and Kerouac's On the Road (1957), likewise, supply the legendary twin...

"Blissful, Torn, Intoxicated": Brinkmann, Fauser, Wondratschek and the Beats.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... Germany was swallowed up by a thousand different American things, bombs, drugs, music, cinema. Our longings were not built into the German Volkswagen. They drifted over from Hawaii, from Los Angeles, and later from New York. The economic...

"O fellow travelers I write you a poem in Amsterdam": Allen Ginsberg, Simon Vinkenoog, and the Dutch Beat Connection.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... In the beginning of September 1957 Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, travelling through Europe after having visited William S. Burroughs in Tangiers, arrived in Paris. They were planning to stay with Gregory Corso, who was exploring Europe on...

Beating the Academy.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... I'm concerned with how to teach the Beats when my colleagues don't care why I teach them. My concern is paradoxical, perverse even, since it makes teaching the Beats always odd. The problem is Beat pedagogy's position within pedagogy itself,...

A Compact Guide to Sources for Teaching the Beats.(beat generation of American literature)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2000... That the Beats should be a subject of study in the established halls of learning is a peculiar, multifaceted irony. The Beats scorned stuffy academics, insisting that the literary establishment was boring. Various scholars and professors,...

The Women Who Stayed Home From the Orgy.(Review)
January 1, 2000... Knight, Brenda, ed., 1996. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. Berkeley: Conan Press. $14.95 sc. xii + 366 pp. Peabody, Richard, ed., 1997. A Different Beat: Writings By Women of the...

The Beat Generation is Now About Everything.(Review)
January 1, 2000... Steven Watson. 1995. The Birth of the Beat Generation. Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters 1944-1980. NewYork. Pantheon. $27.50 hc. 387 pp. Lisa Phillips, ed. 1995. Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965. New York. Whitney Museum of...