Essay Again

Part One: The Last Modernists? (15%)

Premises: What is The Beat?

Where are we supposed to be-at?

Take one of the following works:

• Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"
• William Burrough's Naked Lunch
• Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans
• The performance essays we read from John Cage's Silence

And examine, explore, define, and expand on what that author meant by The Beat. Through this general premise and probe, you could (succintly) engage the following ideas:

• the rhythmic pulse of the author's prose or poetry (style, form, diction, tone, syntax)
• the narrative intentions (direction and movement in the work; attitude towards audience; rhetoric and form)
• the movement of breath--the nature of their regenerative aims
• the dark and light beatitudes, metaphors of descent and ascent, thus the deeper mythic context of the author's work
• the live-recreative element, the kinetic closeness and demands of orality
• a reference back to Surrealism, Dadaism, Imaginism, Lewis's vortex, H.D.'s escatic poetics, Woolf's attempt to grasp consciousness, Miller's naked confessional and anecdotal form, the aesthetics of epiphanic moment, Pound's attempt to hold all culture in the imagination through fragmentary nodes or seeds, Williams' new world manifesto of "say it/ no ideas but in things."

The application of secondary sources here is mandatory.

Part Two: You (5%)

Premise: Soul Journey

A creative opportunity to reflect, recreate, modify, vary, develop, extend, interrogate or interview The Beat Theme. You may write a story, a poem, a short drama, a song, illustrate through a picture, or interview the author you choose (or the characters in the work you choose) as if that personality could still be with us (and according to Ginsberg, in the imagination they are). Imagine Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, and Cage as the call; you are the response.