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The Beat Generation

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This is a collection of essays about the Beat writers which could serve as excellent material for a college seminar. It is of great interest to the general reader, also. Kerouac consciously sought an outsider existence. At one point he concluded that the very definition of writer equals outsiderness. He used the Shadow, a comic hero, and the Faust legend in his book of childhood, DR. SAX.

William Burroughs's aesthetic is the image in flux. His prose aligns with moviemaking qualities. Film plays both stylistic and thematic roles in his work. Contextualization is usefull to instructors and students in the study of Burroughs. NAKED LUNCH may be approached as a do it yourself tapestry.

Allen Ginsberg told an interviewer that he wanted to do nothing but write poetry. He makes reference to his Blakean visions throughout his career. Ginsberg pastoralized certain aspects of the city and industrialism.

Many of the Beats embraced a romantic idealism, a tendency not possible of being infused into the mainstream of Dutch literature. The reception of Beat literature in France met a similar fate. The failure of influence occurred notwithstanding the friendships of poets and writers from America, the Netherlands, and France, and the stays of Corso and Ginsberg and others in both France and the the Netherlands.

Kerouac's fictionalized memoir, DHARMA BUMS, portrays Gary Snyder and other West Coast poets. A key element of Snyder's gestalt is Zen Buddhism. As a student Snyder was led to the works of Ezra Pound and to Ernest Feollosa's EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART. Kerouac's description of Snyder's process of poetry-making likens artistic composition to natural process. In an essay Snyder cites the Buddhist sense of homelessness. It is possible for such homelessness to undergo an expansion to the point of being at home in the whole universe.

Allen Ginsberg and others have noted the Beat affinities with the other arts, the visual arts. The Beats have had their own identifying geographies-- Lowell, Massachusetts, Columbia University and the Village, the West Coast, Colorado, Mexico City, Kyoto.