The Beat Generation Research Paper

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is often regarded as one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century, and his writing covers a wide range of social topics regarding the status of American culture during the 1950s and 60s. Many of Ferlinghetti’s works focus on his vision of America and how that vision had not come to fruition because of the less than ideal situations surrounding American culture at the time. Consequently, Ferlinghetti was also an avid member of the Beat generation and used his ability to write as a platform for spreading the message of the Beatniks. As we have discussed in class, the Beatniks refer to the generation of young people during the 1950s and 1960s that rode the wave of counterculture that was sweeping the

Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Byron Hurt examined the troubling aspects of hip hop music. Hip hop was said to have brought masculinity back to the game. One aspect of this troubling masculine culture is the idea of hyper masculinity. The term hyper masculinity is defined as the exaggeration of male stereotypical behavior, such as an emphasis on physical strength, aggression, and sexuality. These three attributes create the disturbing facets of what hip hop music portrays to the media and the public.

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, explores the complex worlds of masculinity, friendship, freedom and the delusions of the American dream. It was extremely influential to American culture and it spoke to young Americans of that generation as well as the generations that followed. On the Road is an exploration of the world of the traveler, and from it Kerouac was able to create a world in his book that illustrates the lives as well as the motivations of a counterculture he named the ‘Beats’. Kerouac saw the counterculture he created as a people who wanted to escape the restrictions, repressions and conformities of American culture, particularly white middle class culture. Kerouac was able to describe this

An argument can be made that the women in Jack Kerouac's On The Road are not as characteristically well developed as the men. Through Sal and Dean's interactions with women, the reader sees that there exist two types of females in this novel - the benevolent virgin/mother figure or the whore. Women are constantly referred to in a negative way or blatantly degraded and insulted by numerous characters. However, Kerouac (through the character of Sal) exhibits sympathy for women. Sal does occasionally participate in female stereotyping, but this is simply because he wants to fit in. Although Sal may try to make arguments against the poor treatment of women, the novel in its entirety seems to

Mary Shelley brings attention to feminist issues simply by exposing the speaking limitations, the level of control men have, and suppressed decision making.

Although women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced oppression and unequal treatment, some people strove to change common perspectives on the feminine sex. John Stuart Mill, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Virginia Woolf were able to reach out to the world, through their literature, and help change the views that society held towards women and their roles within its structure. During the Victorian era, women were bound to domestic roles and were very seldom allowed to seek other positions. Most men and many women felt that if women were allowed to pursue interests, outside traditional areas of placement that they would be unable to be an attentive

O'Connor's position is that a way exists for man to escape the prison of the mundane physical world, but it is not of self-will and has nothing to do with material possessions. This position is in contrast to those of many O'Connor contemporaries; Jack Kerouac, for instance, made a career of celebrating the joys of the physical world, most notably in his novel On the Road, which portrays the automobile as a quick ticket to freedom. Other American novelists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, decried the spiritual wasteland they saw the world as but offered little hope for escape from it.

The beat generation was a movement that sought to oppose American society values, and any sort of control. They explored Eastern religions, was somewhat postmodernism, rejected the materialistic culture, spoke about drugs, our conscious mind, and fought for sexual liberation and exploration with their unapologetically offensive language. While reading the novel Jitterbug Perfume written by Tom Robbin, one can witness how the novel exhibits aspects of the beat literature, and thus concluding that the beat generation served as inspiration to Tom Robbin.

Ken Kesey was a part of The Beat generation and many of their ideologies and the socio cultural context of U.S post WWII were evident through characters and various discourses throughout One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, giving us his invited reading.

The turbulent societal changes of the mid-20th Century have been documented in countless forms of literature, film and art. On the Road by Jack Kerouac was written and published at the outset of the counter-culture movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This novel provides a first-hand account of the beginnings of the Beat movement and acts as a harbinger for the major societal changes that would occur in the United States throughout the next two decades. On the contrary, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a Hunter S. Thompson novel written in 1971 provides a commentary on American society at the end of the counter-culture movement. Thompson reflects on the whirlwind of political and social activism he experienced and how American society had

Jack Kerouac is considered a legend in history as one of America's best and foremost Beat Generation authors. The term "Beat" or "Beatnic" refers to the spontaneous and wandering way of life for some people during the period of postwar America, that seemed to be induced by jazz and drug-induced visions. "On the Road" was one such experience of Beatnic lifestyle through the eyes and heart of Jack Kerouac. It was a time when America was rebuilding after WW I. Describing the complexity and prosperity of the postwar society was not Karouac's original intent. However, this book described it a way everyone could visualize. It contained examples and experiences of common people looking for new and exciting

So, in consequence, there are many instances of the diminishment of the female identity. These can be seen in the novels treatment of the female characters like Marylou, Sal's Aunt, and Terry. Marylou is repeatedly talked about, not talked to. In the part in which Dean wishes Sal to sleep with Marylou the only dialogue that goes on is either Sal's or Dean's. Marylou has no lines. All she really has is a little "go ahead". That is all and that really does not even imply cooperation; only coercion like "go ahead and You do Your thing to me". Dean is flippantly wanting Marylou to sleep with his friend with little regard to anything she feels. She is a women, and, what is more to Dean she is a whore so of course she will sleep with Sal. To Sal's credit though he does ask what she wants or thinks from the start but this sudden care seems to arise due to his own nervousness and insecurities not any kind of genuine feeling for Marylou. Her identity as seen through the eyes of men would fall into the whore stereotype of women. This is the exact opposite from Sal's Aunt. The most apparent treatment of Sal's Aunt as something less than an equal comes at the end of part one. Sal has just returned from his first trip west. He is tired. He has been starving for three days now and of course eats everything in the house. Then his Aunt's few extensive lines in the entire novel occur, and in a decidedly motherly fashion she says "Poor little Salvatore". She has fulfilled Sal's

this point in time, as they were believed to be inferior to men. The works of female authors were not as

Several nonconformist American writers of the 1950s gave birth to the Beat Generation through their experimental writing, lifestyle, religious practises, and philosophies. Writers such as John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Gregory Corso advocators all critical to the movement. But “[a]t the core of the Beat culture were still-notable poets and literary figures like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom helped to build one of the first centers of Beat culture, in North Beach San Francisco” (Issitt 2). Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Allen Ginsberg’s collection of poems called Howl, in addition to Williams S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, were immensely influential. In 1952 John Holmes birthed the term “Beat Generation” through an essay on the

Many writers in the group later renounced the term when they felt it lost its meaning. It took the beats a long time before they gained fame however. Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, went through many different publishers before anyone agreed to print it. When it did come out it was heavily criticized by the press. In the 1950's the lifestyle that On the Road explored was considered deviant. "The stereotype that emerged in the mass media was a spaced-out beatnik, dressed in black, pounding on bongo drums and muttering gibberish as poetry" (Microsoft Encarta, 2001). America's youth, however, identified with the feelings of despair and the need for freedom expressed in their work. The beats created a revolution that began with many young people leaving their conventional lives to hitchhike around American and find themselves.