Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

Film critic David Sterritt presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the Beat Generation, its intersections with main-stream and experimental film, and the interactions of all of these with American society and the culture of the 1950s. Sterritt balances the Beat countercultural goal of rebellion through both artistic creation and everyday behavior against the mainstream values of conformity and conservatism, growing worry over cold-war hostilities, and the "rat race" toward material success.

After an introductory overview of the Beat Generation, its history, its antecedents, and its...

In the only critical examination of all of Jack Kerouac's published prose, James T. Jones turns to Freud to show how the great Beat writer used the Oedipus myth to shape not only his individual works but also the entire body of his writing.

Like Balzac, Jones explains, Kerouac conceived an overall plan for his total writing corpus, which he called the Duluoz Legend after Jack Duluoz, his fictional alter ego. While Kerouac's work attracts biographical treatmentthe ninth full-length biography was published in 1998Jones takes a Freudian approach to focus on the form of the work. Noting that...

Although the bitch has always commanded a prominent spot in popular culturetelevision, movies, artshe virtually disappeared from the work of the second wave of feminist writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now, announces Sarah Appleton Aguiar, the bitch is back, returned once more to cultural center stage in the world of serious literature.

Feminist writers such as Mary Gordon and Alice Walker, to name only two, felt obligated to subvert literary misrepresentations of females as dimensionless, to refute preconceptions of objectified characters, and, of paramount importance, to...

Film critic David Sterritt s "Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility" showcases the social and aesthetic viewpoints of lynchpin Beat writers Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, juxtaposing their artistry with 1950s culture and achieving what Kerouac might have called a bookmovie riff. In clear prose, Sterritt captures the raw energy of the Beats and joins in their celebration of aesthetic freakishness. Tapping into the diversified spirit of the Beat Generation and its nuanced relationship with postwar American culture, Sterritt considers how the...

"Action Writing: Jack Kerouac s Wild Form" connects the personal and creative development of the Beat generation s famous icon with societal changes in postwar America. Michael Hrebeniak asserts that Jack Kerouac s wild form writing that is free of literary, grammatical, and syntactical conventions moves within an experimental continuum across the arts to generate a Dionysian sense of writing as raw process. "Action Writing" highlights how Kerouac made concrete his 1952 intimation of something beyond the novel by assembling ideas from Beat America, modernist poetics, action painting,...

Unraveling the mysteries of "Naked Lunch, "exploring the allure of fascination

William Burroughs is both an object of widespread cultural fascination and one of America s great writers. In this study, Oliver Harris elucidates the complex play of secrecy and revelation that defines the allure of fascination. Unraveling the mystifications of Burroughs the writer, Harris discovers what it means to be fascinated by a figure of major cultural influence and unearths a secret history behind the received story of one of America s great original writers.

In "William Burroughs and the Secret...

Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber? the London "John Bull" remarked in October of 1851. And yet, the reviewer went on, few books which professedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the "Pequod"'s whaling expedition. A decade and a half before surprising the world with a book of Civil war poetry, Melville was already confident of what was poetic in his prose. As Hershel Parker demonstrates in this book, Melville was steeped in poetry long before he called...

Contributors: Yolanda Barnes, Tammie Bob, Terri Brown-Davidson, Eileen Cherry, Loretta Collins, Page Dougherty Delano, Steve Fay, William Loizeaux, Dean Shavit, and Cassandra Smith.

One reader writes, "I read Natural Shocks as a student, and this novel has stayed with me over the years. I recall the poignant pain-pleasure I experienced in...