Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose and the Post-War Avant-Garde
My title comes from one of Kerouac’s own essays, “Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation,”
which he published in Esquire in March 1958. In it, he identifies the Beats as
subterranean heroes who’d finally turned from the ‘freedom’ machine of the West and were taking drugs,
digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the ‘derangement of the senses,’ talking strange, being
poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought) completely free
from European influences (unlike the Lost Generation), a new incantation. (Kerouac, “Aftermath” 47)
Kerouac’s “new style for American culture” was the spontaneous prose method he developed in 1952, a dazzling
fusion of the colloquial and the literary that utilized stylistic strategies drawn from movies, comic strips, pulp
fiction, and jazz. But, fifty years on, Kerouac’s stylistic brilliance has still not been fully recognized. His reputation
still rests, unfortunately, on his two most commercial novels, On the Road and The Dharma Bums.
Neither of these novels is spontaneous prose. One version of On the Road was, indeed, written in a three
week period on a 100 foot scroll of teletype paper, but Kerouac developed spontaneous prose after this famous scroll
experiment; furthermore, the version of On the Road that was finally published in 1957 had been significantly
revised several more times in the intervening years (Hunt 1). As Kerouac said in a 1968 interview, “In the days of
Malcolm Cowley, with On the Road and The Dharma Bums, I had no power to stand by my style for better or worse.
When Malcolm Cowley made endless revisions...
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In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac strengthens his argument for the Zen ideal of poverty and freedom by this criticism of the conformity practiced by the middle-class:
Jack Kerouac, was born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, as the youngest of three children. Jack decided to be a writer after his brother Gerard died at the age of nine. From the life and death experience of his brother's death, and the Catholic faith of his childhood, he developed a spiritual tendency in his character that would last throughout his life. The fact that Kerouac was a spiritual "seeker," may be the most vital aspect of his life. In post WWII, Eisenhower America, Jack Kerouac came from a poor rustic industrial community to change the face of American Culture forever. He chronicled the wild rebellious culture of "the Beats" in the late 50's and early 60's, paving the way for a more accepting American Society and the tolerance of alternative lifestyles enjoyed today.
One of the most famous of the generation was Jack Kerouac. Kerouac, a writer who was fascinated with jazz, drugs and philosophy embodied this counter culture lifestyle, even taking on the title, “king of the beats.” Wildly passionate for new experiences, Kerouac saw himself as a spy in someone else's body, an observer in/of the world recording through the keyhole of his eye living in such a way that he would eventually document and compose into his masterpiece. Kerouac opened the eyes...
According to Albert Murray, the African-American musical tradition is “fundamentally stoical yet affirmative in spirit” (Star 3). Through the medium of the blues, African-Americans expressed a resilience of spirit which refused to be crippled by either poverty or racism. It is through music that the energies and dexterities of black American life are sounded and expressed (39). For the black culture in this country, the music of Basie or Ellington expressed a “wideawake, forward-tending” rhythm that one can not only dance to but live by (Star 39).
By the end of World War I, Black Americans were facing their lowest point in history since slavery. Most of the blacks migrated to the northern states such as New York and Chicago. It was in New York where the “Harlem Renaissance” was born. This movement with jazz was used to rid of the restraints held against African Americans. One of the main reasons that jazz was so popular was that it allowed the performer to create the rhythm. With This in Mind performers realized that there could no...
Nies, M.A. & McEwan, M. (2015). Health a community view. In Community/public health nursing: promoting the health of populations (6th ed.) (p. 1). St. Louis, Missouri: Elsevier.
Jazz music prospered in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Jazz was created by African Americans to represent pain and suffering and also represented the adversity that racial tension brought. (Scholastic) African American performers like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie “Bird” Parker came to be recognized for their ability to overcome “race relati...
In Kafka Was the Rage, Broyard described his life as a hipster. It was 1947, after the world war II. Brossard chose to live in Greenwich Village with Sherri Donatti, who was an abstract painter, rather than to live with his parents in Brooklyn. The Greenwich Village at that time presented the freedom and new ways of thinking, which was the world of artist and writers. There was peace and prosperity and a bright new world for the young. He insists that he is not the voice of the beat generation, however, his behavior can be regarded as the beat generation. He likes going to clubs and having sex with various girlfriends. “I say that sex used to be more individual, more personally marked, than it is now”(Broyard, p141). He thinks that the topic of sex is much different from the past and there is no shame to talk about the sex. Another hipster, Peggy Guggheim, has many common features with Broyard, since she admits that she has many sexual relation with many artists and writers. From my perspective, Broyard and Guggheim are beatnik since they both being free, believe the sexual liberation and being creative, which match the philosophy of beat generation which is conducting of oneself to reject white society, combining experimentation of using drugs and sexual liberation. Beat is the mindset of the beatnik subculture, which related each other. As Leland mentioned in the book, “The beats prescribed an ethos of lifestyle change”(Leland, p153). Beats generation changed a lot and even can easily tell from the clothing.They prefer to wear unusual or exotic dress. Social responsibility for them means nothing and they hate work and study. They disdain social order, against any stereotypes. Chasing freedom, using drugs and having sex is gradually becoming part of their life. Leland described them in this way, “The beats romanticized black life at the margins, imaging it as
"In the age that coined the word "togetherness" as a synonym for family values, the Beats, each in his own style mounted the first open, sustained assault in American history on the masculine role as heterosexual spouse, father and grown-up provider. In the midst of the Cold War crusade against all deviations from the masculine norm, in the era that could almost be said to have invented the idea of classified information, they openly addressed homosexuality, bisexuality, and masturbation in their work, declassifying the secrets of the male body, making sexuality as complex as individual identity and pushing their chosen forms to new limits in the process" (Ann Douglas)
Without standardized test teachers don’t know what the students are learning and achieving is good enough and are the students able to do better and if so how. The use of portfolio assessment cannot determine how much learning has occurred to measure the comparison to a standardized test. In portfolio assessment, the learners reflect on their own work. What is in the reflections are what the students did in their portfolio and the method used to make the portfolio. Portfolio assessments can be represented as less reliable. Having to develop one's individualized criteria can be difficult or unfamiliar at first. It can be very time consuming for teachers to organize and evaluate the content of portfolios. Teachers and administration believe the portfolios are not demonstrating what students need to know. Furthermore, they are very time consuming for teachers to organize and evaluate the content of the portfolio. It can also show no pattern of growth and achievements when doing portfolios. Portfolio assessments are very hard to analyze to show
Leadership has been described as a “complex process having multiple dimensions” (Northouse, 2013). Over the past 60 years, scholars and practitioners have introduced a vast amount of leadership models and theories to explain this complex field and examine its many perspectives. Numerous leadership theories and models have attempted to define what makes a leader effective. From the early 1900s, the trait paradigm dominated leadership literature, focusing on inherited traits of leaders and suggesting that “leaders are born, not made”. However, during the 1950s, the trait approach lost enthusiasm as focus shifted to the behavior of leaders. Similar to the trait theory, the behavioral paradigm was based on general effective leadership behaviors
The "Beat Movement" in modern literature has become an important period in the history of literature and society in America. Incorporating influences such as jazz, art, literature, philosophy and religion, the beat writers created a new vision of modern life and changed the way a generation of people seen the world. The generation is now aging and its representative voices are becoming lost, but the message is alive and well. The Beats have forever changed the nature of American literature. They offered a method of escape from the unimaginative world we live in. There are many different writers who's work contributed to the literature of the beat movement; however; Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg were the most famous authors.
The name came up in conversation with the novelist John Clellot Holmes, who published an early Beat Generation novel, Go, along with a manifesto in The New York Times Magazine: "This Is the Beat Generation". The adjective "beat" was introduced to the group by Herbert Huncke, though Kerouac expanded the meaning of the term. "Beat" came from underground slang-the world of the hustlers, drug addicts, and petty thieves, where Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac sought inspiration. "Beat", in the drug world, meant being robbed or cheated. But for Kerouac "beat" had various definitions and connotations. It meant despair over the beaten state of the individual in mass society, a belief in the beatitude, or blessedness of the natural word, and in the powers of the beat of jazz music and
The American writer Jack Kerouac became the leading chronicler of the beat generation, a term that he used to label a social and literary movement in the 1950s. After studying briefly at Columbia University, he achieved fame with his spontaneous and alternative writing style, particularly the novel On the Road (1957). After the success of this work Kerouac produced a series of similar novels, including The Dharma Bums and The Subterraneans (both 1958), Doctor Sax (1959), Lonesome Traveler (1960), and Big Sur (1962). His autobiographical works reflect a wandering life, with warm but stormy relationships and a deep social lack of expectation satisfied by drugs, alcohol, mysticism, and biting humor. What Jack started was more than just a new style of writing; it was his revolutionary ideas that marked the beginning of a new generation.
The label “Beat Generation” was first publicized in a 1952 New York Times Magazine article entitled, “This is the Beat Generation.” In this article, author John Clellen Holmes states that “beat” means “More than mere weariness,” involving “a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.” (Holmes) These feelings became the inspiration for the Beat writers and from them sprang ideas that permeated throughout society. Major interests among the Beats were freedom, self-expression, and a rejection of mainstream ideologies (such as those governing drugs, sex, and spirituality). (Scheibach 213)