To browse Academia. My thesis explores the role of religion and spirituality in the work of the Beat Generation, a mid-twentieth century American literary movement. I focus on four major Beat authors: William S. Through a close reading of their work, I identify the major religious and spiritual attitudes that shape their texts. They also assert the primacy of the individualβa major American valueβin a society which the authors believed to encroach upon individual agency. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso are also strongly influenced by established religious traditions: an aspect of their work that is currently overlooked in Beat criticism.
Ginsberg is heavily influenced by the Jewish exe He was ready to embrace everything but unwilling to give up anything, and thus he embarked on the Buddhist vehicle s to enlightenment, which allowed him to pursue his art and aspire to spiritual awakening. The reckless and rebellious aesthetic of the Beat Generation has left a resonating impression on American literature and culture.
Resolving to abandon the normative values of s society-which they thought placed too much emphasis on consumerism and feigned respectability-the Beats embraced defiantly hedonistic lifestyles to attain spiritual transcendence. However, this iconic mantra intrinsically follows the ideology of their predecessor-Walt Whitman. In the spirit of Whitman, the Beats value human experience, and emphasize the importance of the body insofar as the role it plays in arriving at various planes of reality and fantasy.
This thesis will consider in what ways the Beats both adopt and reimagine Whitman's ethos of the body and sexuality, with special focus on why the Beats incorporate drug usage into their philosophy. The Beat Generation, being a social and literary movement led by young male artists in mid 20th Century North America, has often been synonymous with rebellion and non-conformity.
Those principal traits, while they could be construed as a manifest desire to breach the fixed postwar social and literary code, may be interpreted differently. The present research paper will endeavor to offer this opportunity by approaching the Beats from a new angle, based on an analysis of the inner motifs behind their rejection of mainstream American society and literature, and thus through each of On the Road, Howl and Junky, written respectively by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S.
