Beats and Counterculture (Carmona)

The idea of citizenship has come under intense scrutiny as America browns. The growth  of the undocumented population has coincided with the emergence of a generation of young Latino Americans who were either brought here as children or were born to non-citizens. These young people are particularly vulnerable because their families live in the shadows under the threat of deportation, persecution, and increasingly draconian measures designed to criminalize immigrants and to strip young Americans of their citizenship and constitutional protections.

 Neuroses novels have plot, theme, setting or characterization based around psychoses. In the fiction form, either autobiographical or make-believe, they give the reader a glimpse into lives of people who struggle with mental illness whether it is depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or any other diagnosis defined by the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Text Revised.

One of the main rhetorical elements that has kept the Beat Generation and the Beat Movement influential for over 60 years has been the influence of Kerouac’s work on writers and artists of color and so I will explore how his life and work set the groundwork for America’s largest and most influential literary and social movement. 

Each generation has needed a hero, and the hippie counterculture of the early 1970s found one in Divine Right Davenport, the often tripped-out roamer in Gurney Norman’s Divine Right’s Trip.  Criticism has focused on D.R.’s journey into the wilderness and his slaying of a dragon, but research has failed to address the significance of the novel’s first half, which is vital to D.R.’s creation of himself as a fully-realized individual.  In this paper, which was written for an undergraduate class and is currently under consideration for publicatio

As a young, unpublished poet in the unsteady climate of the nuclear nation, Ginsberg performed a draft of his infamous “Howl” at the Six Gallery reading, inducing tears, cheers, and a legal dispute, and acting as a mark in the timeline of the literary movement of the Beats. The impact of it initial performance allows Ginsberg’s words to transcend the page and be examined with theories of speech, specifically the performative speech theories of J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words.