American Studies Commons^™

Introduction To Global Beat Studies, Oliver Harris, Polina Mackay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Authorship In Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy And Bowles's Translation Of Moroccan Storytellers, Benjamin J. Heal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Authorship in Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy and Bowles's Translation of Moroccan Storytellers" Benjamin J. Heal discusses Paul Bowles's and William S. Burroughs's varying interrogation of the constructed nature of authorship. In his study Heal focuses on the publication history of Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night (1981), which was written with considerable collaborative influence and Bowles's translation of illiterate Moroccan storytellers, where his influence over the production and editing of the texts is blurred as are the roles of author and translator. Through an examination of Bowles's and Burroughs's authorship strategies in parallel with an explication of …

Fashion And Female Beat Identity In The Writing Of Jones, Johnson, And Di Prima, Raven J. See

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Fashion and Female Beat Identity in the Writing of di Prima, Johnson, and Jones" Raven J. See discusses how the women writers of the Beat Generation have become iconically defined by their fashion choices. Clothing and accessories offer Beat women a means to construct and express their identity and Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, and Hettie Jones write about fashion in their narratives of self-creation. Like their male contemporaries, Beat women make style choices that allow them to reject mainstream culture and identify within Beat subculture. However, these women write about their decisions to accept or reject …

The Cultural Translation Of Ginsberg's Howl In Turkey, Erik Mortenson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Cultural Translation of Ginsberg's Howl in Turkey" Erik Mortenson examines three Turkish translations of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl in order to explore the ways in which Ginsberg's poem becomes redeployed in new cultural contexts. Orhan Duru and Ferit Edgü's 1976 translation presents a more politicized Ginsberg that draws on his anti-establishment credentials as a social activist. This comes as little surprise, since in pre-1980 coup Turkey rebellion was thought in purely political terms of right verses left. Hakan Arslan's 1991 update provides a less political and more familiar Ginsberg, in keeping with a society that left …

Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Bowles's Up Above the World as Beatnik Murder Mystery" Greg Bevan discusses Paul Bowles's fourth and final novel, which at the time of its publication was met with mixed reactions from reviewers and its creator alike, and has seen relatively scanty critical attention in the years since. Gena Dagel Caponi perceives in the novel a reflection of Bowles's struggle for control, during the time of its writing, in the face of his wife Jane's terminal illness. Building on this insight, the current essay notes the same tension in the writings of the Beats—a movement with which Bowles …

Race, Gender, And The Beats In Tan Magazine's "I Was A Victim Of The Beat Generation", Chelsea M. Stripe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Race, Gender, and the Beats in Tan Magazine's 'I Was a Victim of the Beat Generation'" Chelsea Stripe discusses the "true to life" story of Sara Howard, a single African American mother who becomes pregnant by a white Beat and struggles to raise their child alone. On the one hand, "I Was a Victim of the Beat Generation" emphasizes the exploitative character of Beats' affinity for African American culture and of their attitudes toward women. Further, Howard's story critiques the social fluidity that Beat privilege allows. On the other hand, the story articulates conservative US-American middle class …

The Greek Beat And Underground Scene Of The 1960s And 1970s, Eftychia Mikelli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Greek Beat and Underground Scene of the 1960s and 1970s" Eftychia Mikelli discusses the renewed interest in the Beat Generation in Greece. She argues that it is less known that the Beats exercised significant influence upon Greek underground literature and culture in the sixties and seventies, inspiring the development of a Greek Beat "hybrid." Bearing the influences of US-American Beat, new writing emerged which was also shaped by a distinctively Athenian social and cultural context, eventually leading to the formation of the Greek "Scene." This is the term by which Beat-influenced Greek artists, such as Spyros …

Burroughs As A Political Writer?, Alexander Greiffenstern

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Burroughs as a Political Writer?" Alexander Greiffenstern discusses political elements in William S. Burroughs's work. Greiffenstern looks at Burroughs's text "The Coming of the Purple Better One" written for Esquire about the Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968. By writing a surprisingly personal text, Burroughs might have captured something about the significance of the convention that many later historical accounts miss. In the end, Burroughs leaves the critical reader no other choice than to attempt a historical and political analysis.

Burroughs's Folios As An Archival Machine For Artistic Creation, Tomasz D. Stompor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Burroughs's Folios as an Archival Machine for Artistic Creation" Tomasz D. Stompor discusses the significance of archival material as a scholarly resource for the analysis of William S. Burroughs's cut-up experiments. Stompor retraces the history of the author's filing system as both a referential repository and a device for documentation and investigates its function as an eperimental machine for the production of cut-up texts and layouts

Literary Creolization In Layachi's A Life Full Of Holes, Maarten Van Gageldonk

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Creolization in Layachi's A Life Full of Holes" Maarten van Gageldonk discusses the publication of Larbi Layachi's 1964 book by Grove Press based on a transcription and translation by Paul Bowles. Both Bowles and the editors at Grove Press made numerous alterations to the content and form of Layachi's tales in order to make them more accessible for readers. In the process, Layachi's book became a "cultural creole" (Hannerz). Drawing on archival materials from the Grove Press Records housed at Syracuse University, van Gageldonk examines how in its published form A Life Full of Holes …

The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Impact of Burroughs's Naked Lunch on Chester's The Exquisite Corpse" Jaap van der Bent posits that although Alfred Chester was critical of most Beat writing, in Tangier in the early 1960s he associated not only with Paul Bowles, but also with William S. Burroughs. Van der Bent argues that The Exquisite Corpse, the experimental novel Chester wrote in Tangier, shows the influence of the city's geography and especially the content and form of Burroughs's Naked Lunch.

Ginsberg's Translations Of Apollinaire And Genet In The Development Of His Poetics Of "Open Secrecy", Véronique Lane

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Ginsberg's Translations of Apollinaire and Genet in the Development of his Poetics of 'Open Secrecy'" Véronique Lane analyzes the extent to which the journals, letters and poems of Allen Ginsberg are marked by constant reference to literary models that give just as much weight to French as to American writers. Focusing on his long involvement with Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Genet's works, Lane argues that Ginsberg meticulously constructed the genealogy of his poetry through a threefold strategy of literary quotation, translation and encryption. Uncovering this strategy through analysis of "Howl," "At Apollinaire's Grave," and "Death to Van …

Kerouac And Burroughs In Tangier, Regina Weinreich

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Kerouac and Burroughs in Tangier" Regina Weinreich discusses the two authors' and their friends' lives in Tangier. Given Burroughs's need for collaboration as a significant part of his method of weriting, Kerouac's more solitary approach to writing, and taking into account unpublished journals and new scholarship on this subject, Weinreich explores their time together in Tangier in order to shed some light on the two writers in an "interzone" of their processes of creation.

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of The Beat Generation, Oliver Harris, Polina Mackay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Tangier And Kerouac's Oriental Experience In Liminality, Peggy Pacini

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Tangier and Kerouac's Oriental Experience in Liminality" Peggy Pacini discusses Kerouac's production derived from his Tangerian experience. Since the Tangier narratives have no existence of their own in the Duluoz Legend and are included in larger volumes about traveling and passing through, Pacini examines how this production cohered within the entire Legend and the terminology and world vision Kerouac had already fashioned. Focusing on two texts, "Big Trip to Europe" and "Passing through Tangiers, France and London," Pacini considers Kerouac's and his alter ego Duluoz's visions of Tangier and their journey to Tangier as many thresholds or …

Arabic Music And Burroughs's The Ticket That Exploded, David M. Holzer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Arabic Music and Burroughs's The Ticket That Exploded" David Holzer discusses how the experience of hearing Arabic music in Tangier and being exposed to the healing music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka, a remote village in the foothills of the Ahl Srif mountain range in Northern Morocco, significantly influenced both the writing of William Burroughs and his multi-media experiments. This essay considers what Arabic music and specifically that of Joujouka meant to Burroughs, with particular reference to The Ticket That Exploded (1962). Drawing on The Ticket, Burroughs’s letters, critical studies and biographical material, it …

The Road Trip As Artistic Formation In Defeo's Work, Frida Forsgren

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Road Trip as Artistic Formation in DeFeo's Work" Frida Forsgren discusses previously unpublished photographic material documenting Jay DeFeo's road trip in Europe and North Africa in the 1950s. Forsgren argues that the Beat road trip is by no means an exclusively masculine enterprise and quest: DeFeo's journey helped open the door to her emancipation as a female artist and propelled her artistic development. Moreover, the global experience represented by the trip helped shape her local Beat milieu upon her return to San Francisco. While European, Medieval, Italian Renaissance, and Hebrew influences in DeFeo's oeuvre have been …

Theories Of Opiate Addiction In The Early Works Of Burroughs And Trocchi, Richard English

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Theories of Opiate Addiction in the Early Works of Burroughs and Trocchi" Richard English discusses William S. Burroughs's and Alexander Trocchi's representations of opiate addiction with special reference to their early writings. English examines the concept of homo heroin that can be attributed to Burroughs and lists and expounds its qualities. Among these are: immorality, criminality, mono-objectuality, self- and other-indifference, and, most importantly, the radical physical transformation into a new species, which Burroughs extends in Naked Lunch. English shows how homo heroin relates to Trocchi's conception of a heroin addict, which serves to illustrate that homo …

Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions in The Yage Letters" Melanie Keomany discusses the contents of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg's The Yage Letters which could be dismissed as openly bigoted and racist. Keomany posits that the text reveals valuable connections between the colonial expansion of the eighteenth century and 1950s USA and Latin America. By re-shaping Burroughs's lived experiences in the Amazon into a text where the narrator William Lee mimics sardonically and parodically the colonial scientific explorer, The Yage Letters provides valuable insight into the complex postcolonial context of the mid-twentieth century.

Utopia In Progress In Di Prima's Revolutionary Letters, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Utopia in Progress in di Prima's Revolutionary Letters" Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo describes Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters (1971) within the context of social transformation and spatiality studies. In the context of the socio-political revolt and utopian revival of the 1970s, di Prima's utopia is grounded in reality and in progress; and it needs people's help and strength to be attained. In the first section of the article Pinedo analyzes a group of letters which serve as "tips" or a "how-to" guide to prepare for a revolution and in the second part she considers letters in which glimpses …

The Beat "Pad", Heike Mlakar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Beat 'Pad'" Heike Mlakar analyzes the importance of Joan Vollmer's and Hettie Jones's Manhattan apartments as centers for the upcoming avant-garde movement of the time in order to understand the meaning of "home" in postwar bohemianism in general and specifically for female Beats. In sensationalized late 1950s films and in print media, the Beats were associated with low-rent Beat "pads" in poor urban areas, in which wild all-night parties were held—sites of drug use, destitution, and sexual promiscuity. Both Vollmer and Jones contributed greatly to the formation of the Beat Generation by providing the perfect setting …

How Burroughs Plays With The Brain, Or Ritornellos As A Means To Produce Déjà-Vu, Antonio José Bonome

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "How Burroughs Plays with the Brain, or Ritornellos as a Means to Produce Déjà-Vu" Antonio José Bonome discusses how the recurrence and significance of one of William S. Burroughs's most potent refrains, "dim jerky faraway," was inspired by its source text, Paul Bowles's second novel Let It Come Down (1952), where Tangiers-Interzone fuels the unwholesome descent of a US-American expatriate not unlike Bowles or Burroughs himself. "Dim jerky faraway" was used by Burroughs during more than two decades in different contexts, and its textual variations have sparked a mélange of colors, sounds, smells, and feelings oscillating in …

Burroughs's Re-Invention Of The Byronic Hero, Franca A. Bellarsi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Burroughs's Re-Invention of the Byronic Hero" Franca A. Bellarsi discusses George Gordon Byron's (1788-1824) and William S. Burroughs's (1914-1997) texts as masterful examples of irreverence which earned notoriety in their own days. Yet despite the scandalous aura of lawlessness, iconoclastic cynicism, and nomadic elusiveness which surrounds both authors' work, a parallel between them has never been attempted. Bellarsi argues that more than a hundred years after Burroughs's birth, assessing his work implies understanding that his enduring appeal across languages and cultures rests in part on how his writing pushes the transformation of the Byronic myth further in …

Politics Of Feminist Revision In Di Prima's Loba, Polina Mackay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Politics of Feminist Revision in di Prima's Loba" Polina Mackay explores Diane di Prima's two-volume epic Loba (1998) and, through a comparison of di Prima to the work of Adrienne Rich, argues that Loba practices a politics of feminist revision. Further, Mackay examines the ways in which di Prima starts to move away from the recovery project of female voices in patriarchal culture, associated with late twentieth-century Feminism, towards a women's literature which need not be defined entirely through its resistance to patriarchal narratives of gender in men's literature. Here it focuses on di Prima's revisionist …

Beat Contenders (Micheline, Sanders, Kupferberg), A. Robert Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Beat Contenders (Micheline, Sanders, Kupferberg)" A. Robert Lee asks if we are in danger of too fixed a Beat canonization. That is, do the Usual Suspects—Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs, with Corso, Ferlinghetti, Cassady, and Snyder in the frame—assume too presiding a role? There is, for sure, rightly, increased recognition of Beat women writers and attention has been given to the Afro-Beat circuit and, indeed, to a wider multicultural roster to include Latino/a and Asian American authorship. Beat's international reach has won its place, from the United Kingdom and Continental Europe to Japan and Australia. Even so, other …

Severing Ties: A Lacanian Reading Of Motherhood In Joyce Carol Oates’S Short Stories "The Children" And "Feral", Uroš Tomić

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This paper approaches two of Joyce Carol Oates’s short stories (“The Children” and “Feral”) from a Lacanian perspective on the tripartite structure of personality in an attempt to analyze questions of motherhood and the parent-child separation process. Although published 35 years apart both stories deal with mothers who have trouble containing their maternal attitude and children who become elusive entities for their parents. Utilizing as well the concept of what Oates has termed “realistic allegory” in the analysis of characters situated within highly specific settings and circumstances, the paper aims to shed light on Oates’s vision of the workings of …

A Salisbury Christmas In Berlin, 1838, Robin Dougherty

Roberta L. Dougherty

A Salisbury Christmas In Berlin, 1838 Manuscripts And Archives Blog.Pdf, Robin Dougherty

Roberta L. Dougherty

No abstract provided.

A Bounded Affinity Theory Of Religion And The Paranormal, Joseph O. Baker, Christoper Bader, F. Carson Mencken

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

We outline a theory of bounded affinity between religious experiences and beliefs and paranormalism, which emphasizes that religious and paranormal experiences and beliefs share inherent physiological, psychological, and ontological similarities. Despite these parallels, organized religious groups typically delineate a narrow subset of experiences and explanatory frames as acceptable and True, banishing others as either false or demonic. Accordingly, the theory provides a revised definition of the “paranormal” as beliefs and experiences explicitly rejected by science and organized religions. To demonstrate the utility of the theory, we show that, after controlling for levels of conventional religious practice, there is a strong, …

African Dreams Of America: Diaspora Experience In The Writing Of Aidoo, Adichie And Cole, Gbenga Olorunsiwa

American Studies ETDs

This study explores four African diasporic texts against a backdrop of the African dream of America, diasporic experience, post-colonialism and racism in the U.S. as portrayed in the writings of Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1971), Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2014), and Teju Cole’s Open City (2012) and Every Day Is for the Thief (2014). I argue that the African dream of America is different but also exemplary of the American experience and therefore a privileged lens for understanding “America.” During the course of this research project, I found that while the writings of Adichie and Aidoo are …