Breaking the Rule of Cool

Breaking the Rule of Cool
Author: Nancy McCampbell Grace
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2012
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 9781604735994

Download Breaking the Rule of Cool Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

BIOGRAPHY LITERARY CRITICISM The Beat movement nurtured many female dissidents and artists who contributed to Beat culture and connected the Beats with the second wave of the women's movement. Although they have often been eclipsed by the men of the Beat Generation, the women's contributions to Beat literature are considerable. Covering writers from the beginning of the movement in the 1950s and extending to the present, this book features interviews with nine of the best-known women Beat writers, including Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Brenda Frazer (Bonnie Bremser), Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman, and the critic Ann Charters. Each is presented by a biographical essay that details her literary or scholarly accomplishments. In these recent interviews the nine writers recall their lives in Beat bohemia and discuss their artistic practices. Nancy M. Grace outlines the goals and revelations of the interviews, and introduces the community of female Beat writers created in their conversations with the authors. Although they have not received attention equal to the men, women Beat writers rebelled against mainstream roles for young women and were exuberant participants in creating the Beat scene. Mapping their unique identities in the Beat movement, Ronna C. Johnson shows how their poetry, fiction, and memoirs broke the male rule that defined Beat women as silent bohemian chicks rather than artistic peers. Breaking the Rule of Cool combines the interviews with literary criticism and biography to illustrate the vivacity and intensity of women Beat writers, and argues that American literature was revitalized as much by the women's work as by that of their male counterparts. Nancy M. Grace, a professor of English at the College of Wooster, is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Literature, the Beat Scene, and the Artful Dodge. Ronna C. Johnson, a lecturer in English and American Studies at Tufts University, has been published in College Literature, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the Poetry Project Newsletter. Johnson and Grace are the editors of and contributors to Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation."

Modern American Counter Writing

Modern American Counter Writing
Author: A. Robert Lee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 681
Release: 2010-01-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113516164X

Download Modern American Counter Writing Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. This new study analyses three recent literary tranches in the tradition: a re-envisioning of the whole Beat web or circuit; a consortium of postwar "outrider" voices – Hunter Thompson to Frank Chin, Joan Didion to Kathy Acker; and a latest purview of what, all too casually, has been designated "ethnic" writing. The aim is to set up and explore these different counter-seams of modern American writing, those which sit outside, or at least awkwardly within, agreed literary canons.

Research Guide to American Literature

Research Guide to American Literature
Author: John Cusatis
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438134053

Download Research Guide to American Literature Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Covers American literature during the postwar period.

The Transnational Beat Generation

The Transnational Beat Generation
Author: N. Grace
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137014490

Download The Transnational Beat Generation Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This collection maps the Beat Generation movement, exploring American Beat writers alongside parallel movements in other countries that shared a critique of global capitalism. Ranging from the immediate post-World War II period and continuing into the 1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.

Historical Dictionary of the Beat Movement

Historical Dictionary of the Beat Movement
Author: Paul Varner
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2012-06-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0810873974

Download Historical Dictionary of the Beat Movement Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Beat Movement was one of the most radical and innovative literary and arts movements of the 20th century, and the history of the Beat Movement is still being written in the early years of the 21st century. Unlike other kinds of literary and artistic movements, the Beat Movement is self-perpetuating. After the 1950s generation, headlined by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, a new generation arose in the 1960s led by writers such as Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, and poets from the East Side Scene. In the 1970s and 1980s writers from the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and contributors to World magazine continued the movement. The 1980s and 1990s Language Movement saw itself as an outgrowth and progression of previous Beat aesthetics. Today poets and writers in San Francisco still gather at City Lights Bookstore and in Boulder at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and continue the movement. It is now a postmodern movement and probably would be unrecognizable to the earliest Beats. It may even be in the process of finally shedding the name Beat. But the Movement continues. The Historical Dictionary of the Beat Movement covers the movement’s history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on significant people, themes, critical issues, and the most significant novels, poems, and volumes of poetry and prose that have formed the Beat canon. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Beat Movement.

Women Writers of the Beat Era

Women Writers of the Beat Era
Author: Mary Paniccia Carden
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813941237

Download Women Writers of the Beat Era Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Beat Generation was a group of writers who rejected cultural standards, experimented with drugs, and celebrated sexual liberation. Starting in the 1950s with works such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the Beat Generation defined an experimental zeitgeist that endures to today. Yet left out of this picture are the Beat women, who produced a large body of writing from the 1950s through the 1970s and beyond. In Women Writers of the Beat Era, Mary Paniccia Carden gives voice to these female writers and demonstrates how their work redefines our understanding of "Beat." The first single-authored study on female writers of this generation, the book offers vital analysis of autobiographical works by Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, and others, introducing the reader to new voices that interact with and reconfigure the better-known narratives of the male Beat writers. In doing so, Carden demonstrates the significant role women played in this influential and dynamic literary movement.

Merely Being There Is Not Enough

Merely Being There Is Not Enough
Author: Heike Mlakar
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1599426560

Download Merely Being There Is Not Enough Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Despite the advent of second wave feminism in the late 1960s, it took more than twenty years before feminist literary criticism started to pay attention to the complex role of women Beat writers. Merely Being There Is Not Enough theorizes the memoirs of Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, and Brenda Frazer, and analyzes their contributions to the Beat movement. Among the writings of female Beat authors, the memoir has become the most commonly used literary genre. At the height of the Beat movement, Frazer published Troia: Mexican Memoirs in 1969, the same year that saw the publication of di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik . Most female Beat voices, however, remained astonishingly silent until 1983, when Johnson published Minor Characters: A Young Woman's Coming of Age in the Beat Generation . Johnson's long-time friend Jones followed with How I Became Hettie Jones in 1990. The memoirs of Beat women chronicle the Beat-1950s and the intimate relationships with icons of the time: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and Ray Bremser. Being there at a crucial moment in history validates female Beats' stories as indispensable social documents of the 1950s. To make women Beat writers visible and to categorize their memoirs, this work immerses in the almost paradoxical project of defining a category of female Beat writing when it is the nature of Beat literature and its rebellious aesthetics to dismiss any kind of labeling. Women Beats unsettle the categories of Beat writing and culture: Therefore, a revision and re-examination of Beat history is inevitable to understand the movement's literary expression.

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats
Author: Steven Belletto
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316885623

Download The Cambridge Companion to the Beats Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats offers an in-depth overview of one of the most innovative and popular literary periods in America, the Beat era. The Beats were a literary and cultural phenomenon originating in New York City in the 1940s that reached worldwide significance. Although its most well-known figures are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the Beat movement radiates out to encompass a rich diversity of figures and texts that merit further study. Consummate innovators, the Beats had a profound effect not only on the direction of American literature, but also on models of socio-political critique that would become more widespread in the 1960s and beyond. Bringing together the most influential Beat scholars writing today, this Companion provides a comprehensive exploration of the Beat movement, asking critical questions about its associated figures and arguing for their importance to postwar American letters.

ruth weiss

ruth weiss
Author: Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2021-10-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110694557

Download ruth weiss Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

ruth weiss, born in Berlin in 1928 to Austrian-Jewish parents, arrived in San Francisco in 1952 after hitchhiking through the United States. Crowned years later as the “Goddess of the Beat Generation” by San Francisco Chronicle critic Herb Caen, weiss has worked for almost seven decades with a plurality of artistic forms. Despite her extensive poetry career and very active participation in the West Coast buzzing artistic community since the early 1950s, weiss has remained an essentially overlooked figure in poetry history. This neglect might be representative of the overshadowing of female artists within the Beat Generation as “a marginalized group within an always already marginalized bohemia” (Johnson). The volume taps directly into this lacuna by proving the first close study on one of the most prolific members of the so-called Beat Generation. Offering diverse and comprehensive points of entrance into weiss’s oeuvre, the essays in this volume adopt a multidisciplinary approach that attests to the cross-pollination between art forms in postwar counterculture. In addition, the volume also includes shorter, non-academic contributions and previously unpublished archival material. Bringing together scholars, academics and artists from around the world, this volume represents a timely and much-needed response to the increasing interest in weiss’s work in the last decades.