This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression, romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas – ideas that doubted human perfectibility, spurned the majority for a spiritually elect few, and had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of icons in the counterculture – the controversial sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed ‘philosopher of hip’, Norman Mailer – Guy Stevenson explores a set of paradoxes at its centre: between romantic optimism and modernist pessimism; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, Stevenson argues, help explain the cultural and political worlds these writers shaped – in their time and beyond.
Author(s): Guy Stevenson
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 223
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Romanticism, Humanism and the Counterculture
No Bob Dylan Without Ezra Pound
Anti-humanism/Anti-Romanticism
‘The Making of a Counterculture’
From Schopenhauer, Through Hulme to Heidegger
The Argument
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Henry Miller and the Beats: An Anti-humanist Precedent
The European Beat Heritage
Intermediary Henry Miller
Mad, Marvellous Failures
Miller’s ‘Master’
The Beat Céline
Spengler’s Cowboys
Miller and English Modernism
Miller and Ezra Pound
The Anti-humanist Reversal
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Their Transcendentalist Gloom
The Lost Generation Mark II
A Fascination with Evil
Idealism Versus Fatalism
The New Vision
Fin de Siécle to Modernism
Imbibing Spengler
Passively Accepting Horror
From Idealism to Spengler
The Moral Aspect
‘Accelerating Toward Apocalypse’
The Fellaheen
Tristessa
‘The Future’s in Fellaheen’
Us Versus the ‘Finks’
Primitivism, Virtue and Sin
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 4: William Burroughs’ Immodest Proposal
Beat Rectitude
The Human Specimen
Meta-history Over Politics
Junkie
Naked Lunch
‘Washing Away the Human Lines’
Amodern/Post-human
‘It’s Difficult to Know What Side You are Working On’
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 5: The Philosophy of Hip: Norman Mailer’s ‘Spiritual Existentialism’
Spiritual Existentialist
‘The White Negro’
The Psychic Outlaw
Fear and Trembling
America Beyond Sublimation
Death and Determinism
The Prisoner of Sex
The Politics of Identity
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Counterculture Then and Now
Beyond Protectionism
The World That Miller Made
Fatalism and Elitism
Two Types of Anti-humanist
The Counterculture and the Masses
‘One-Dimensional Man’
The Beats in History
Postscript: Countercultures Today
Works Cited
Index
