About the Book
Every society has rebels, outlaws, troublemakers, and deviants. This collection of primary sources takes readers on a journey through the intellectual and cultural history of the “underground” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It demonstrates how thinkers in the US and Europe have engaged in an ongoing trans-Atlantic dialogue, inspiring one another to challenge the norms of Western society. Through ideas, artistic expression, and cultural practices, these thinkers radically defied the societies of which they were part. The readings chart the historical evolution of challenges to mainstream values -- some of which have themselves become mainstream -- from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: ROOTS OF A TRANSATLANTIC UNDERGROUND
Henri Murger, Scenes of Bohemian Life, 1851
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods,1854
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 1864
Arthur Rimbaud, “My Bohemian Existence (A Fantasy),” 1870
George Du Maurier, Trilby, 1894
Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi, 1896
Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 1908
F.T. Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto,” 1909
PART II: UNDERGROUND HAUNTS: MONTMARTRE AND GREENWICH VILLAGE
Theodore Dreiser, A Traveler at Forty, 1913
Konrad Bercovici, Around the World in New York, 1924
Floyd Dell, “The Rise of Greenwich Village,” 1926
Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary,1927
PART III: WAR AND NEW GENERATIONS
Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return, 1934
Michel Leiris, Manhood, 1939
Gertrude Stein, Paris France, 1940
Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 1956
PART IV: BLACK, COOL, AND HIP
George Antheil, “Negro on the Spiral, or A Method of Negro Music,” 1934
Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues, 1946
Boris Vian(Vernon Sullivan), I Spit on Your Graves, 1946
James Baldwin, “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown,” 1950
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952+
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” 1957
Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans, 1958
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
PART V: RETHINKING GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Emma Goldman, “Victims of Morality,” 1913
Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, 1943
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949
Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement, “The Redstockings Manifesto,” 1969
Carl Wittman, “A Gay Manifesto,” 1970
PART VI: CHALLENGERS TO CONFORMITY
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud,1955
Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris, 1966
Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga,1966
Rudi Dutschke, “The Students and the Revolution,” 1968
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968
Václav Havel, “Letter to Alexander Dubček,” 1969
Credits
Index
About the Author :
Jeffrey H. Jackson is the J.J. McComb Professor of History at Rhodes College and the author of Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Duke UP 2003) and Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Palgrave 2010).
Robert Francis Saxe is Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College and author of Settling Down: World War II Veterans’ Challenge to the Postwar Consensus (Palgrave 2007).
Review :
“An impressive work of outstanding scholarship, The Underground Reader: Sources in the Transatlantic Counterculture… is an exceptionally work of seminal scholarship and very highly recommended, especially for personal and academic library Philosophy collections.” · Midwest Book Review
