231201 Freedom of Expression: Beatnik Literature through the Lens of Democracy (S) (WiSe 2024/2025)

"Their language was dizzying, drunken, irreverent, tender, scatological, elegiac, and often hilarious. They were the Beats. Strictly speaking, the group comprised Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassidy, and Herbert Huncke, but the term also extended to intersecting groups of post-World War II American writers--among them poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain School, and the New York School. Additionally, there were various hangers-on, wannabe bohemians, and so-called second-generation Beats--all disillusioned (but not cynical) young people struggling to redefine themselves, to discover sexual and political liberation and perhaps a new kind of faith. 'Beat' was not just about a common aesthetic. It was also a lifestyle, a state of mind." -- Carmela Ciuraru

This course is going to take a deep dive into the Beat generation's poets and poetry, novels and novelists, their contexts and contents; dropping a mouse into its labyrinth and finding our way out.

Literaturangaben

Literature will be made available on our Moodle site.