World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature

by Jimmy Fazzino

Overview

This fascinating book explores Beat Generation writing from a transnational perspective, using the concept of worlding to place Beat literature in conversation with a far-reaching network of cultural and political formations. Countering the charge that the Beats abroad were at best naïve tourists seeking exoticism for exoticism’s sake, World Beats finds that these writers propelled a highly politicized agenda that sought to use the tools of the earlier avant-garde to undermine Cold War and postcolonial ideologies and offer a new vision of engaged literature. With fresh interpretations of central Beat authors Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs—as well as usually marginalized writers like Philip Lamantia, Ted Joans, and Brion Gysin—World Beats moves beyond national, continental, or hemispheric frames to show that embedded within Beat writing is an essential universality that brought America to the world and the world to American literature. This book presents an original treatment that will attract a broad spectrum of scholars.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611689471
Publisher:	Dartmouth College Press
Publication date:	04/05/2016
Series:	Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	258
File size:	598 KB

About the Author

JIMMY FAZZINO is a lecturer in the literature department and writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Worlding the Beats • A World, a Sweet Attention: Jack Kerouac’s Subterranean Itineraries • The Beat Manifesto: Avant-Garde Poetics, Black Power, and the Worlded Circuits of African American Beat Writing • A Multilayered Inspiration: Philip Lamantia, Beat Poet • Cut-Ups and Composite Cities: The Latin American Origins of Naked Lunch • For Africa . . . for the World: Brion Gysin and the Postcolonial Beat Novel • Columbus Avenue Revisited: Maxine Hong Kingston and the Post-Beat Canon • Notes • Bibliography • Credits • Index

What People are Saying About This

Brian T. Edwards

“Jimmy Fazzino has written a provocative book that brings the Beat writers into discussions of global U.S. literary studies. He makes a compelling case that we understand the subterranean connections, transnational itineraries, and poetic aspirations of both major and minor figures of the Beat generation as a worldliness that in turn reorients critical understanding of midcentury U.S. literature.”

Oliver Harris

“Theoretically sophisticated and critically informed, World Beats is a rich work of erudition and also a passionate engagement with cultural history that sets a new standard for transnational readings of Beat writings.”

Editorial Reviews

“Fazzino puts Beat Generation writing in an international perspective, considering how it is ‘worlded.’ He is good on the developing world influences on William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Jack Kerouac. He provides the most extended treatment to date on the work of Philip Lamantia, and he is the first critic to scrutinize Gysin’s little-known novel The Process. This is a useful contribution to the growing critical discussion of the Beats as transnational writers. . . .Recommended.” ”—Choice

From the Publisher

Fazzino does a fine job of bringing Beat literature out of its hagiographical comfort zone, and up-to-date with current academic debate. It is refreshing to read Burroughs in relation to Wai Chee Dimock on “deep time,” for example.

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