The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats

The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats PDF Author: David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108416454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The first comprehensive study to explore the role of esoteric, occult, alchemical, shamanistic, mystical and magical traditions in the work of major Beat authors.

The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats

The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats PDF Author: David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108416454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book

Book Description
The first comprehensive study to explore the role of esoteric, occult, alchemical, shamanistic, mystical and magical traditions in the work of major Beat authors.

The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats

The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats PDF Author: David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110826770X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats is the first comprehensive study to explore the role of esoteric, occult, alchemical, shamanistic, mystical and magical traditions in the work of eleven major Beat authors. The opening chapter discusses Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan as predecessors and important influences on the spiritual orientation of the Beats. David Stephen Calonne draws comparisons throughout the book between various approaches individual Beat writers took regarding sacred experience - for example, Burroughs had significant objections to Buddhist philosophy, while Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac both devoted considerable time to studying Buddhist history and texts. This book also focuses on authors who have traditionally been neglected in Beat Studies - Diane di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia and Philip Whalen. In addition, several understudied work such as Gregory Corso's 'The Geometric Poem' - inspired by Corso's deep engagement with ancient Egyptian thought - are given close attention. Calonne introduces important themes from the history of heterodoxy - from Gnosticism, Manicheanism and Ismailism to Theosophy and Tarot - and demonstrates how inextricably these ideas shaped the Beat literary imagination.

Hard to Be a Saint in the City

Hard to Be a Saint in the City PDF Author: Robert Inchausti
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834841096
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
An exploration of Beat spirituality--seen through excerpts from the writings of the seminal writers of Beat Generation themselves. It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—iconic figures like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure—were thinkers seeking exactly that. In this re-claiming of their vision, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at heart a spiritual one. It goes deeper than the Buddhism with which many of the key figures became identified. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary. Theirs is a spirituality where real life triumphs over airy ideals and personal authenticity becomes both the content and the vehicle for a kind of refurbished American Transcendentalism.

The Beats in Mexico

The Beats in Mexico PDF Author: David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978828721
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its landscape, history, and mystical practices in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti, as well as lesser-known female Beat writers like Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger.

The Beats

The Beats PDF Author: Nancy Grace
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979962
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
'[This] survey of the many little magazines carrying the Beat message is impressive in its coverage, drawing attention to the importance of their paratextual content in providing valuable socio-political context. [...] The collection contains a range of insightful close readings, astute contextualizing, and inventive lateral pedagogical thinking, charting the transformation of the Beat scene from its free-wheeling, self-help, heady revolutionary 1960’s days to its contemporary position as an increasingly respectable component of the curriculum. [...] The Beats: A Teaching Companion is successful on a number of levels; it is a noteworthy contribution to the ever expanding field of Beat studies and, more broadly, cultural studies; and it is a collection that at its best gives hope that in referring to its ideas the inspired teacher may still be able to enlarge the lives of their students.' John Shapcott, Keele University

The Beats in Mexico

The Beats in Mexico PDF Author: David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 197882873X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Mexico features prominently in the literature and personal legends of the Beat writers, from its depiction as an extension of the American frontier in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to its role as a refuge for writers with criminal pasts like William S. Burroughs. Yet the story of Beat literature and Mexico takes us beyond the movement’s superstars to consider the important roles played by lesser-known female Beat writers. The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its culture in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. It also devotes individual chapters to women such as Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger, who each made Mexico a central setting of their work and interrogated the misogyny they encountered in both American and Mexican culture. The Beats in Mexico not only considers individual Beat writers, but also places them within a larger history of countercultural figures, from D.H. Lawrence to Antonin Artaud to Jim Morrison, who mythologized Mexico as the land of the Aztecs and Maya, where shamanism and psychotropic drugs could take you on a trip far beyond the limits of the American imagination.

Beat Feminisms

Beat Feminisms PDF Author: Polina Mackay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000509885
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
This is the first book-length study to read women of the Beat Generation as feminist writers. The book focuses on one author from each of the three generations that comprise the groups of female writers associated with the Beats – Diane di Prima, ruth weiss and Anne Waldman – as well as on experimental and multimedia artists, such as Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker, who have not been read through the prism of Beat feminism before. This book argues that these writers’ feminism evolved over time but persistently focussed on intertextuality, transformation, revisionism, gender, interventionist poetics and activism. It demonstrates how these Beat feminisms counteract the ways in which women have been undermined, possessed or silenced.

Kerouac

Kerouac PDF Author: Hassan Melehy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501314351
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Given Jack Kerouac's enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word “poetics.” But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous “spontaneous prose” only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice. Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to the French language and the reason for his bilingualism, the Québec Diaspora. Although this background has long been recognized in French-language treatments, it is a new dimension in Anglophone studies of his writing. In a theoretically informed discussion, Hassan Melehy explores how Kerouac's poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a naïve pursuit, Kerouac's writing practice not only responded but contributed to some of the major aesthetic and philosophical currents of the twentieth century in which notions such as otherness and nomadism took shape. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a major reassessment of a writer who, despite a readership that extends over much of the globe, remains poorly appreciated at home.

Diane di Prima

Diane di Prima PDF Author: David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501342916
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions reveals how central di Prima was in the discovery, articulation and dissemination of the major themes of the Beat and hippie countercultures from the fifties to the present. Di Prima (1934--) was at the center of literary, artistic, and musical culture in New York City. She also was at the energetic fulcrum of the Beat movement and, with Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), edited The Floating Bear (1961-69), a central publication of the period to which William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Frank O'Hara contributed. Di Prima was also a pioneer in her challenges to conventional assumptions regarding love, sexuality, marriage, and the role of women. David Stephen Calonne charts the life work of di Prima through close readings of her poetry, prose, and autobiographical writings, exploring her thorough immersion in world spiritual traditions and how these studies informed both the form and content of her oeuvre. Di Prima's engagement in what she would call “the hidden religions” can be divided into several phases: her years at Swarthmore College and in New York; her move to San Francisco and immersion in Zen; her researches into the I Ching, Paracelsus, John Dee, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, alchemy, Tarot, and Kabbalah of the mid-sixties; and her later interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions is the first monograph devoted to a writer of genius whose prolific work is notable for its stylistic variety, wit and humor, struggle for social justice, and philosophical depth.

Alan Watts in Late-Twentieth-Century Discourse

Alan Watts in Late-Twentieth-Century Discourse PDF Author: Peter J. Columbus
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003802443
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book is an anthology of commentary and criticism written within the transitional period between Alan Watts’ 1973 death and the twenty-first century intellectual horizon. Comprised of 16 chapters written and published between 1974 and 1994, with up-to-date introductions from the essayists and other contemporary thinkers, this volume opens a window onto unexplored grounds of Alan Watts’ impact within late-twentieth-century discourse – an intermediate space where scholars reoriented their bearings through changing times and emerging academic trends. Offering varied explanations and assessments of Alan Watts, including his influence on the Beat and Hippie generations, and his popularization of Zen Buddhism in America, it tackles unaddressed questions within the milieu of late-twentieth-century America from the Reagan Revolution and religious conservatism, to paradigm shifts in Buddhist studies and the rise of post-colonial theory. Contributors’ post-mortem analyses and critiques of Watts allow for a thematic rendering of their consonance or dissonance with noted Beat, Hippie, and Zen Buddhism themes of his lifetime. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of humanistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, the psychology of religion, comparative religion, and American studies.