The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs [Hardcover]

John Lardas (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0252025997 | ISBN-13: 978-0252025990 | Publication Date: November 15, 2000

Blending biography, cultural history, and literary criticism, "The Bop Apocalypse" explores the religious concerns, metaphysical realities, and spiritual pursuits that undergirded the early friendship and literary collaborations of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. Presenting a religious biography of the Beats from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, John Lardas shows that in rejecting many of the cultural tenets of postwar America, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs created new visions of both self and country, visions they articulated through distinctive literary forms.Lardas examines how the Beat writers distilled a theology of experience - a religious vision that animated their everyday existence as well as their art - from a flurry of disparate influences that included the saxophone wails of Charlie Parker and Lester Young, the psychology of Wilhelm Reich, the linguistic theories of Alfred Korzybski, the hipster dialects of New York City, and especially the prophecies of Oswald Spengler. Revisiting the major works the Beats produced in the 1950s in terms of critical content, Lardas considers how their lived religion was incorporated into the way they wrote.The first sustained treatment of Beat religiosity, "The Bop Apocalypse" takes a sophisticated look beyond the cartoonish reductions of the Beat counterculture. "The Bop Apocalypse" takes the Beats at face value, interpreting their sexual openness, drug use, criminality, compulsion to travel, and madness as the logical, physical enactments of a religious representation of the world. Far from dallying irrelevantly on the fringes of society, Lardas asserts, the Beats engaged America on moral grounds through the discourse of public religion.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In a highly interesting study, Lardas sets out to chart the spiritual vision that fueled the work of Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs... Viewing the art of the Beats in its cultural context, Lardas offers a more coherent shape to their literary careers. Highly recommended." -- Choice "For those who concur with Truman Capote that Kerouac's writing is mere typing, for those who ascribe Norman Podhoretz's famous epithet of 'know-nothing' to the Beats, for those who think that Burroughs was just another queer junky or Ginsberg just another whiny Jewish mama's boy or Kerouac just another pretty face, think again. Lardas's new critical study provides more than enough solid scholarship to challenge these particularly mean-spirited, ill-informed putdowns of the Beats as intellectual lightweights. After reading this book, you may still find fault with the poetry and polemics, but you won't find their minds thin and thoughtless, their literary output culture lite." -- American Book Review "Lardas has written a well researched and carefully argued scholarly work. He has established the authenticity of the Beats' pain over the failings of America and their zeal to bring about a better society through their lives and art... The most valuable contribution of this study is that Lardas has demonstrated the large influence that Oswald Spengler had on the thinking of all three Beats." -- Christianity and Literature "A model academic literary study: it avoids the jargon and free-association speculations of theory-addled, PC-blinkered critics and instead concentrates on the demonstrable sources of the Beat vision and their influence on their creative work... May be the finest book written on the Beats to date and deserves the widest readership possible." -- Rain Taxi ADVANCE PRAISE "An indispensable study that explains the religious/philosophical underpinnings of the counterculture. It is impossible fully to understand the Beat Generation without reading John Lardas's enlightened work." -- Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center, University of New Orleans "A brilliant exposition of the visionary ambitions animating the Beats, The Bop Apocalypse is written with depth and a genuine understanding of historical dynamics. John Lardas illuminates Beat religiosity--the central expression of a common value system opposed to the dominant American ideological climate after World War II. He sees how the tension of jeremiad and celebration leads to both an artistic complexity and the goal of transfiguration. He has written an essential book." -- John Tytell, author of Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation "This is the most perceptive, nuanced, and exhaustive account extant of the religious character of the Beats' expressive arts. It provides the literary critic with a different way of seeing both the performative/prophetic character of imaginative literature and the ways the religious dimension can be at play. It also provides a fine 'high-level' introduction for the educated general reader, who will now be able to see that the Beats' religious energies were more than a matter of culling Asian systems and outlooks." -- Rowland A. Sherrill, author of Road-Book America: Contemporary Culture and the New Picaresque

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (November 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252025997
• ISBN-13: 978-0252025990
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,188,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Form, Function, Whatever, September 22, 2003

By 

Neal Illich (Underworld) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (Hardcover)

Dr. Lardas' grounding of the early Beats' intellectual program in their communal reading of Oswald Spengler's _Decline of the West_ is an unusually substantive contribution to the field. Too often, monographs on the Beats are either tedious [strange] political treatises masquerading as literary history, or hagiographies of Kerouac's youthful wanderlust, neither of which category of inquiry could possibly add anything to the witness of the individual artists in question through their works. However, Lardas shows that Spengler's vision of the cyclical nature of civilization and the contemporeneity of the end of the Western European cycle led Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg to look for the seeds of the next cycle in the vibrant, marginalized communities of which they were a part.

Dr. Lardas' prose style can best be described as "sparkling ramble". The energy of his ideas, bursting with the Mediterranean vigor of his jacket photo, at times overwhelms the larger structure of the book that is laid upon them. Happily enough this compositional tension congrues with the subject matter.

8 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Those who know know, those who don't won't, October 1, 2003

By 

Midnight Rambler (Main Street) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (Hardcover)

Bless my soul jelly roll, this is not ordinary literary criticism about sources and influences but an epic drama, a hero's journey. A murderer, a schizophrenic, a male prostitute and an alcoholic read a proto-Nazi theory of everything and find personal redemption through pop culture.

But is this the final frame of reference? Every generation since has struggled to re-frame the meaning of the past day by day, and I suspect that's what this book (or its subject matter anyway) is "really" about. It's post-modern, rock-and-roll, cheese bait and cadillac fins. You be the poem.