Reconstructing the Beats

"Reconstructing the Beat Generation" is a collection of essays that collectively seek to re-vision the Beats from contemporary critical, theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives; to reassess their place in mid-century American history and literature, as well as their broad cultural impact since the 1960s; to connect the literature of the Beat movement to the arts of music, painting, and film; to pay attention to less well known figures, including women and African Americans, and thus to expand the restricted canon of three to six major figures established in 1956-70; and to critique media stereotypes and popular cliches that influence both academic and popular discourse about the Beats. Overall, this collection aims to provide the scholarly reassessment that should set new directions for criticism and classroom discussion at the beginning of the 21st century.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Beat Literature and the Folds of Heterogeneity The Transnational Counterculture: Beat-Mexican Intersections Pull My Daisy and Abstract Art The 'Beat Boys; Club': The Social Construction of the Beat Generation as Male Dissidents The Politics of the Beatnik Counterculture Ruth Weiss and Lenore Kandel: The Literary Geography of Beat Experimental Poetics 'A Place Where Your Nature Meets Mine': Diane di Prima in the West Joanne Kyger and the Tradition of Zen Beatitude (Un)Defining Beat: Anne Waldmen in India and Under Electronic Surveillance What's My Line? Performing Ted Joans Saxophones and Smothered Rage: Bob Kaufman, Jazz, and the Quest for Redemption Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker, and the Poetics of Improvisation 'A Malicious-looking Smile': Kerouac's Visions of Burroughs Spoken from the Breath: Embodies Poetics of Ginsberg's Later Career Hieroglyphic Book Movie: The Subterranean 'American Visual Form' of Burroughs, Kerouac, and Contemporary International Visual Poetry

About the Author :
JENNIE SKERL is a senior scholar in the field of Beat literature. She has published two books on William S. Burroughs and was a major contributor to the Dictionary of Literary Biography volume on the Beats. She recently edited a collection of original essays on Jane Bowled and a special issue of College Literature on Beat literature.

Review :
'Skerl has gathered a collection of innovative essays that exemplify the most recent recontextualizations and reassessments of Beat Culture and its practitioners. Scholars and students of the field will find the familiar media stereotypes and clichés and the critical canons and legends about the Beats challenged and revisioned. Canonical Beat writers are resituated within a collective and interdisciplinary context where the influences of jazz, abstract impressionism and action painting , performance art, the international avant-gardes, and Buddhism are explored more vigorously than ever before. Critically overlooked African American and female Beat writers are not only recovered for serious analysis, but restored to the recognition they actually enjoyed within the movement itself. This welcome collection is a sophisticated and accessible resource for anyone interested in the aesthetics and politics of twentieth-century American counter-culture.' - Robin Lydenberg, author of Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction 'The beats refuse to be forgotten or ignored out of existence because the challenges they faced and the struggles they undertook, and not the solutions they tried to offer or the victories they sometimes claimed, remain very much our own: mind and matter, individual and collective, majority and minority, gender and race. The contributors to Jennie Skerl's Reconstructing the Beats, both the new voices and those alreadywell-known, bring these challenges and struggles back to life for us by broadening our definition of who and what the Beats were and by deepening our understanding of exactly how and why they became so. This collection cannot fail to accelerate and intensify the ongoing and much-needed reappraisal of this consistently fascinating episode in contemporary cultural history.' - Timothy S. Murphy, University of Oklahoma, author of Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs