What was the Beat Generation? In this class we shall explore the heritage of what was probably the most -if not the first- genuine counter-cultural movement in US-America: The Beat Generation. Emerging in the 1940’s the writers subsumed under the heading "Beat Generation" have certainly left us with a puzzling and powerful literature that has made its mark on other generations of dissenters, artists and writers ranging from the Hippies of the 60s to the Punk-Rockers of the 70s and poetry slammers on university campuses today. Probably for the first time in the history of American culture a group of artists aimed at merging life and art by expressing their vision of the possibilities of America in hyperbole and extreme life-styles. As a group they invented cultural practices of resistance, breaking lines of racial or sexual demarcation of the dominant discourses of American life in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
But be that as it may, some of the original members of the movement might have drifted into oblivion while others such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs are still resonating with us. To my mind, especially the work of William Seward Burroughs II is worthwhile revisiting today. His interest in the decomposition and re-composition of language, the fine arts, and the media made him not only one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation but also one of the most extraordinary postmodern writers and thinkers of the 20th century, whose work was and still is admired by artists of diverse backgrounds including Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, William Gibson and Ridley Scott. Against the background of the emergence of the Beat Generation in American culture of the 1940’s and 1950’s we shall discuss together in detail, three of his novels .
Secondary literature on the Beat Generation and William S. Burroughs will be provided online. Students interested in this class will be asked to purchase the following three novels by William S. Burroughs:
1. Naked Lunch. Penguin Modern Classics. 2. The Soft Machine. Penguin Modern Classics. 3. The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. Penguin Modern Classics.
Assignments (3 CPs):
During the course of this class students will be asked to hand in (i.) two response papers and (ii.) and three reading journals.
- Kursleiter/in: Stefan Schlensag