Born to die
The Beat Generation, made up of writers, artists and misfits, was forged not long after the end of World War II. People wanted change, the old ways and traditions were slowly being neglected and social rules of that time were put into question. The Beat Generation were the ones leading the way in questioning the old rules and regulations not because they wanted to but because America wanted it. The Beat Generation was a bohemian hipster like movement that got its drive and inspiration from sexuality, drugs, booze, crazy people and situations and religions like Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. The Beat Generation embraced creativity untouched by culture. These artists found inspiration in past and current art movements like romanticism, French surrealism and modernism. They wanted to express their selves in ways others had not done before. Jack Kerouac, who was at the forefront of it all was most known for his method of spontaneous prose. Among all the subjects the Beat Generation artists wrote about, Jack Kerouac wrote about Catholic spirituality, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty and travel. Kerouac’s way of writing was deliberate and spontaneous. This gave way to a more natural form of communications. His writing was not edited, leading to spontaneous imagery seen through his eyes during his travels. On his travels across Mexico he was inspired by a morphine junkie called Tristessa with whom he fell in love. His inspiration for her led to the writing of his novella Tristessa. She is a source of creativity for him because she is so far removed from the materialism that dominates the American culture in which Kerouac lives. Through his adventures with Tristessa he was able to write prose spontaneously because s...
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...dicts and rather than let them rot, something should be done to help these individuals. By telling this story in such way it gives the novel a more authentic expression and there for it is easier for the readers to connect emotionally with the characters in the story.
Overall, Jack Kerouac is inspired to write spontaneous prose while on an adventure in Mexico with Tristessa and her drug addiction. Her life is so far from the reality that he lives in America and it inspires him to write her story to show the world a different perspective of life. Without writers like Jack Kerouac and all the others from the Beat Generation what would have happened to literature? Would all the twisted and mundane be forgotten and who would tell Tristessa’s stories and the many like her?
Works Cited
Kerouac, Jack. Tristessa: Penguin books. USA, 1992. Print. (P.26, 29, 57, 66)
Words can have a profound, meaningful impact that may alter, shift, and even end lives. In “Create Dangerously”, Edwidge Danticat reveals how words crafted her reality and identity as a woman who lived through a dictatorship. “Create Dangerously” is a nonfiction essay and memoir that focuses on the impact of literature not only in dire times, but in everyday life. Through the use of detail, allusions, and vivid recounting of the past in her writing, Danticat reveals importance and valor of creating art in times where art is a death sentence, and how this belief shaped her identity.
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.
America was built on rebellion. This was no different for the Beat Generation whom took Americans in the 20th century, into a new way of life. Middle class free spirited people who questioned the practices of everyday lifestyle and mainstream culture, the beats lived in disillusionment with society. The fifties being a time of conservative family morals encouraged the bohemian nature of the beats for their want to experience more. The nature of this rejection is expected but, why? And how does such rebellion begin to take place, what forms does it take, and does such rebellion provide a lasting change?
During the “Beat Generation” there were three types of members: the wild boys, the hipsters, and the young politicians. They all have their different personalities and actions they use. The wild boys “drink to `come down’ or to `get high,’ not to illustrate anything.”(2) This shows a change in how they drank. They drank for themselves and to calm their feelings and feel better about them, not to show off to anyone. The wild boys’ characteristics make them `beat’ because are living life to the fullest, without any regret of tomorrow. They drink till they can’t drink no more or party till they can’t stand. This causes them to not worry about what will happen or how they are going to live tomorrow; they only care about the present. The hipsters they want to make “a mystique of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the `square’ society in which he lives, only to elude it.”(3) The hipsters don’t care for society or care what it tells them to do. They go about their ways and do what they want. They don’t want to change the rules or the laws but only to make sure they don’t get swept up in ideas or thoughts that society gives them. The hipsters’ characteristics are `beat’ because they go against what is told to be the proper or correct way. They may get beat down in the beginning and face hard times, but later on they will find new ways of doing things and those will be the new way society sees things. The young politician looks up to “Badditt as a cultural hero.”(3) He goes along with what society has showed him to do. The characteristics of the politician make him beat because he doesn’t do anything for his own; he does what is right to do, and what will get him far in life. When society catches up to him he wil...
In the mid 1940’s a movement began, a generation of writers and poets would emerge; they were called the ‘Beat Generation’. The term was first used by Jack Kerouac while talking to fellow writer John C. Holmes, in 1948, Kerouac said to him, “So I guess you might say we’re the beat generation” (What’s Beat). The ‘Beat Generation’ was a movement that influenced the next generation of young rebellious minds of the 1950’s and ‘60’s through poets and writers who did not follow the rules of society. Growing up I have always liked the poets and writers of that time, the smooth cool way they talked, the slang they used, the goat-tees and black berets they wore and their cool and casual demeanor. The writers and poets of that generation were so passionate in what they wrote, and in their resistance to conformity. Not caring to be like everyone else, instead, they sought to be the individuals that they were, not bowing to what mainstream society thought they should be. Freedom of individuality was their passion. Although it wasn’t until I was older that I really understood what they meant and stood for, the movement had a deeper meaning; to be yourself.
My title comes from one of Kerouac’s own essays, “Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation,”
... (e.g. Nakkula, Toshalis, 2006). The research regarding hipster culture compounds many of Erikson’s theories about identity development, which continue to evolve and mature throughout the course of life, but also emphasizes the importance on an adolescent formation of identity development (during the primary years of an student artist’s most intense training). Overall, the research confirms the belief that creative adolescents develop identities based on their specific choices, and who they choose to be. Although genetic factors play some role in artfulness, creativity is a skilled that is continually honed and refined — much like any other ability in life. The artistic identity is one that is carefully composed and considered, and continually cultivated throughout the course of a lifetime, though this identity formation takes place from a young age in adolescence.
Stripped to its barest essentials, Jack Kerouac's novel Desolation Angels reads as a drug-induced stupor of casual sex (or fantasies thereof), mixed into a melting of jazz and poetry. The often-adolescent urges of Kerouac's character Jack Duluoz, however, are mere episodes in the fast-paced, write-it-as-you-think-it, pre-literary notoriety phase in the life of a man who essentially founded the Beat generation. Though the overflowing stream of consciousness that comprises this book seems undoubtedly spontaneous, Desolation Angels actually examines, in a most straightforward and clearly organized manner, the state of human solitude. Zipping from a Forest Service mountaintop outpost to San Francisco, from Tangiers to London, and slipping from loneliness to jazz clubs full of "cats," from a morphine addict's room to the home of his knitting French Canadian mother, the angels of desolation take on varying shapes, ceaselessly trailing Duluoz/Kerouac.
"But then they danced down the street like dingledoolies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles, exploding like spiders across the starts, and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’" (Kerouac 9)
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
...essity of a “healthy, honest vibrant(not sterile and repressed) cultural space” (Rose 11). However, this space does not only have to exist within hip hop. What attracts me to Afro-Punk is the acceptance of the space of alterity. It is through this alterity that their creative agency is realized. The experience of epistemic violence that has marginalized African-Americans within western society, African-Americans within the predominantly white punk scene, and Afro-Punks within popular media representations of African-Americans has fostered the creation of a space in which alterity is the only requirement. When I complete this project, I hope to have created a comprehensive outline of the empowering potentialities of the Internet that is critical yet optimistic, and rooted in the creative energy that exists within the often unexplored spaces of alterity and abjection.
One theme that is prevalent throughout much of the literature we have covered so far is that it is very critical of the conformist values of late 1950s society. In an era of Levittowns and supermarkets and the omnipresent television, there was a call to leave the conformist suburban culture in search of something higher. Two major proponents of the individual as opposed to society were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, two of the central figures in the Beat movement. Through their work one can gain a perspective on the anti-conformity spirit that was brewing under the surface in the Beat culture.
In every generation there are countercultures, some more prominent and influential than others that go against social norms. Jack Kerouac brought to light the counterculture known as The Beat Generation from under the veil of the conservative surface in the 1950’s, in his book On the Road. This generation was so influential that they were the driving force behind the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 60’s and 70’s. Having strong ideas and values about freedom and personal fulfillment, that they perused relentlessly, they created big changes and even inspired generations after them who feel dissatisfied with the pressures to conform to instead push against the norms of society.
In the 1950s, authors tended to follow common themes, these themes were summed up in an art called postmodernism. Postmodernism took place after the Cold War, themes changed drastically, and boundaries were broken down. Postmodern authors defined themselves by “avoiding traditional closure of themes or situations” (Postmodernism). Postmodernism tends to play with the mind, and give a new meaning to things, “Postmodern art often makes it a point of demonstrating in an obvious way the instability of meaning (Clayton)”. What makes postmodernism most unique is its unpredictable nature and “think o...
To say that the Beat generation has affected modern culture seems at first to be no great revelation; it is inevitable that any period of history will affect the time that follows. The Beat generation is especially significant, though, because of its long lasting impact on American culture. Many aspects of modern American culture can be directly attributed to the Beat writers, primarily Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac. (Asher) Their influence has changed the American perception of obscenity, has had profound effects on American music and literature, and has modified the public’s views on such topics as sex and drug use.