Synopsis
"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.
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About the Author
JENNIE SKERL is a senior scholar in the field of Beat literature at West Chester University, USA. 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.
From the Inside Flap
"Skerl has gathered a collection of innovative essays here 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 cliches and the critical canons and legends about the Beats challenged and re-envisioned. 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: William S. Burroughs' Experimental 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 already well-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
"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 already well-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
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