Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility
Film critic David Sterritt’s Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility showcases the social and aesthetic viewpoints of lynchpin Beat writers Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, juxtaposing their artistry with 1950s culture and achieving what Kerouac might have called a “bookmovie” riff. In clear prose, Sterritt captures the raw energy of the Beats and joins in their celebration of aesthetic freakishness. Tapping into the diversified spirit of the Beat...
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Film critic David Sterritt’s Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility showcases the social and aesthetic viewpoints of lynchpin Beat writers Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, juxtaposing their artistry with 1950s culture and achieving what Kerouac might have called a “bookmovie” riff. In clear prose, Sterritt captures the raw energy of the Beats and joins in their celebration of aesthetic freakishness. Tapping into the diversified spirit of the Beat Generation and its nuanced relationship with postwar American culture, Sterritt considers how the Beats variously foreground, challenge, and illuminate major issues in Hollywood and avant-garde film, critical and cultural theory, and music in the mass-media age. Sterritt engages the creative and spiritual facets of the Beats, emulating their desire to evoke ephemeral aspects of human existence. Dealing with both high and low cultures as well as various subcultures, he highlights the complementary contributions to cultural creativity made by these authors. Screening the Beats grapples with paradoxes in Beat writing, in particular the conflict between spiritual purity and secular connectedness, which often materialized in the beatific bebop spontaneity, Zen-like transcendentalism, and plain hipster smarts that characterized the writings of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. This interdisciplinary study tackles such topics as Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s uses of racial and ethnic stereotypes prevalent in the popular movies of the 1950s era; the uses and limitations of improvisation as a creative tool in literature,jazz, and film; Kerouac’s use of cinematic metaphor to evoke Buddhist concepts; and intersections of the grotesque and carnivalesque in works as seemingly diverse as autobiographical novels by Kerouac, a radio play by Antonin Artaud, cultural theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the boisterous lunacy of Three Stooges farce. Deftly threading literary, musical, and cinematic works with a colorful array of critical theories, Screening the Beats illuminates the relationship between American culture and the imaginative forces of the Beat Generation.
PrefaceAcknowledgments1Beats, Movies, and Ills of Postwar America12Lisped, Muxed, and Completely Flunk: Jack Kerouac Meets the Three Stooges213Desolation Angels: Kerouac, Buddhism, and Film484Revision, Prevision, and the Aura of Improvisatory Art575Constructing the Grotesque Body in Word, Image, and Sound77Notes105Index127
\ From the Publisher“David Sterritt has followed up on the valuable scholarship of his 1998 study, Mad to Be Saved, with this equally excellent analysis. Combining his skills as an astute commentator on beat aesthetics, film, and the post-war ethos at large, he situates the beats squarely in a tradition that is not entirely literary, expanding our sense of their considerable impact on cultural genres that were simultaneously influencing them. This work contributes much to the current reappraisal of beat literature as art.”—Regina Weinreich, author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics: A Study of the Fiction and editor of Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus \ “Sterritt’s ability to cut across Beat literature, avant-garde film, bebop jazz, and sound composition is impressive. The writing is fresh, engaging, and eminently readable, and the application of critical theory is intelligently handled. Screening the Beats presents little-known material and treats familiar material in an original manner, reevaluating the sensibility of Beat writers in light of their personal adventurism, aesthetic experimentation, and social viewpoints.”—Ben Giamo, author of Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester\ “Screening the Beats is an extremely important piece of writing. The scholarship is superior. Each essay is finely crafted and easy to follow, and the order of the essays in the book allows for the arguments to accumulate salience. Audiences will not only welcome this book, but will in fact celebrate its appearance.”\ —James T. Jones, author of Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction\ \ \
