William S. Burroughs, one of the founding members of the counterculture literary movement of the ... more William S. Burroughs, one of the founding members of the counterculture literary movement of the Late-Modernist period known as the Beat Generation, added fuel to the Beat fire when he published his novel, Junky, in 1953, ushering in a heavy dose of in-your-face reality, offering himself as the heroin-ripened sacrifice. The novel, with its self-deprecating, dark subject matter written in linear prose, is an essential example of what makes a novel “Beat” and represents the epitome of Late-Modernism as a departure from other, more mainstream modernist novels. Fast forward six years to Naked Lunch, and we see a Burroughs who has abandoned linearity for radical literary experimentation while still holding fast to his go-to theme of massive drug abuse, though with the added element of exuberant homoerotic exercise. The differences between the two novels are as extreme and uncompromising as artistically possible. Therefore, by comparing the subject matter and linear cohesiveness of his first novel, Junky, to that of his nonlinear, severely disjointed, and often stomach-churning second novel, Naked Lunch, it can be concluded that Burroughs left behind what could be considered Modernism, and moved the world with all literary abandon into a brand new era beyond even Late-Modernism.
Jack Kerouac is known by most as “the father of the Beat Generation,” the voice in the night cryi... more Jack Kerouac is known by most as “the father of the Beat Generation,” the voice in the night crying out in the name of the confused, the lost, the sympathetic; the broken, the misunderstood, the left behind. His was a generation with the weight of America’s future on its shoulders. The irony, of course, is that it wasn’t until On the Road, Kerouac’s breakthrough novel, published in 1957, that the generation from which the author emerged in the mid 1940’s was officially named, finally providing the misfit population he represented a banner under which to gather, and it wasn’t long before his “beat” brothers and sisters became members of perhaps the greatest modern literary movement America had ever seen. He accomplished this extraordinary feat with lightening fast typing skills and a mind that seemingly ceased to rest. That is, until his death in 1969 . Nonetheless, until that time, Kerouac would lead the charge by putting a face to Emerson’s 1836 assertion that “good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. The imagery is spontaneous. It is a blending of experience with the present action of the mind” (Dardess), a statement meant to destroy the convention of dividing prose and poetry into separate categories. Because of its typical nature as an instrument of premeditation, prose had always been viewed as a lesser vehicle for the free flowing literary abandon of which poetry had nearly always found favor with true literary artists. What Emerson could explain, Kerouac could name. And in the spring of 1951, spontaneous prose was born.
William S. Burroughs, one of the founding members of the counterculture literary movement of the ... more William S. Burroughs, one of the founding members of the counterculture literary movement of the Late-Modernist period known as the Beat Generation, added fuel to the Beat fire when he published his novel, Junky, in 1953, ushering in a heavy dose of in-your-face reality, offering himself as the heroin-ripened sacrifice. The novel, with its self-deprecating, dark subject matter written in linear prose, is an essential example of what makes a novel “Beat” and represents the epitome of Late-Modernism as a departure from other, more mainstream modernist novels. Fast forward six years to Naked Lunch, and we see a Burroughs who has abandoned linearity for radical literary experimentation while still holding fast to his go-to theme of massive drug abuse, though with the added element of exuberant homoerotic exercise. The differences between the two novels are as extreme and uncompromising as artistically possible. Therefore, by comparing the subject matter and linear cohesiveness of his first novel, Junky, to that of his nonlinear, severely disjointed, and often stomach-churning second novel, Naked Lunch, it can be concluded that Burroughs left behind what could be considered Modernism, and moved the world with all literary abandon into a brand new era beyond even Late-Modernism.
Jack Kerouac is known by most as “the father of the Beat Generation,” the voice in the night cryi... more Jack Kerouac is known by most as “the father of the Beat Generation,” the voice in the night crying out in the name of the confused, the lost, the sympathetic; the broken, the misunderstood, the left behind. His was a generation with the weight of America’s future on its shoulders. The irony, of course, is that it wasn’t until On the Road, Kerouac’s breakthrough novel, published in 1957, that the generation from which the author emerged in the mid 1940’s was officially named, finally providing the misfit population he represented a banner under which to gather, and it wasn’t long before his “beat” brothers and sisters became members of perhaps the greatest modern literary movement America had ever seen. He accomplished this extraordinary feat with lightening fast typing skills and a mind that seemingly ceased to rest. That is, until his death in 1969 . Nonetheless, until that time, Kerouac would lead the charge by putting a face to Emerson’s 1836 assertion that “good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. The imagery is spontaneous. It is a blending of experience with the present action of the mind” (Dardess), a statement meant to destroy the convention of dividing prose and poetry into separate categories. Because of its typical nature as an instrument of premeditation, prose had always been viewed as a lesser vehicle for the free flowing literary abandon of which poetry had nearly always found favor with true literary artists. What Emerson could explain, Kerouac could name. And in the spring of 1951, spontaneous prose was born.
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