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Why are some authors destined to linger in the public mind while others must languish, doomed if not to oblivion then at least to a sort of “second-thought” status? This paper investigates the question of literary obscurity through a discussion of the Beat poet Harold Norse. Despite writing over a dozen books, being in all the right places at all the right times, and enjoying the company of poetic luminaries William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden (among others), this gay icon’s literary fortunes seemed to have waned. Why is Norse not more well-known? This chapter evaluates the various theories proffered for Norse’s waning afterlife, using Norse as a test case to discuss the question of why we remember some writers (both Beat and non-Beat) and not others.

This chapter explores the pedagogical practices of Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman, focusing specifically on how each attempts to teach writing’s relationship to the passing moment. Olson took the helm of Black Mountain as the college was slowly dissolving, but despite its folding under his leadership, Olson developed a pedagogical stance worthy of closer examination. Waldman and Ginsberg came out of a different pedagogical lineage, but their poetics program, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, was united with Black Mountain in the idea that education should focus more holistically, producing enlightened citizens rather than simple scholars. Focusing on both points of intersection, such as their shared belief in confronting the student with spontaneity, chance, and the present moment, as well as their differences, this chapter provides not only a better understanding of the Black Mountain and Naropa teaching projects but draws on those conclusions to discuss the lasting implications of both schools for contemporary debates surrounding education.

The essay draws on fictional and nonfiction accounts of Beat drug use, distinguishing between mind-expanding drugs, such as marijuana, or hallucinogens, such as LSD, and more addictive substances, such as opiates and amphetamines. The essay contextualizes Beat drug use in western literary traditions, while also encouraging course instructors to consider the gender, race, and class differences in drug use and the persistent racial and class stereotyping fuelling anti-drug rhetoric

This paper examines the Turkish censorship trial of William S. Burroughs’s The Soft Machine and the cultural response it has engendered. Though the Turkish trial process evokes similarities to the various legal battles Burroughs and the Beats faced in the 1950s and 1960s, the absence of First Amendment guarantees in Turkey and its noted history of stifling dissent raises the stakes for Burroughs’s book and its supporters. An examination of how the book’s supporters used the trial in order to raise awareness of repressive governmental practices as well as the often unmentioned issue of homophobia in Turkey reveals both the continual relevancy of Burroughs’s work for social critique globally as well as the ways in which that critique is transformed in order to be made amenable to local needs and concerns.

This paper examines the impact underground literature (yeraltı edebiyatı) has on influencing the opinions and beliefs of Turkey’s youth regarding issues of contemporary importance. In order to understand the relevance of this genre to Turkish youth culture, we have not only examined the debate surrounding the topic in popular and academic circles, but also asked the readers themselves their opinions about their experience with the genre (in both its imported Western and homegrown Turkish variants) and its relevance to their lives. For our purposes, the effect of such texts on readers is the primary focus, and ours is the first mixed-media study to conduct a methodological, data-based investigation into the composition and opinions of underground literature’s readers. Thus, our study supplements a lack in the existing scholarship by offering concrete qualitative and quantitative data that will better elucidate our knowledge of the relationship between underground literature and Turkish youth attitudes, as well as the potential the genre might hold for the future of Turkey’s youth.

This paper examines the attempt by the Turkish underground journal Sizofrengi (1992–98) to provide a space for psychiatrists, artists, and mental patients to voice their personal concerns as a means to critique problems in Turkish society. Sizofrengi was founded by young psychiatrists in order to critique the problems they felt were endemic to their field. Rejecting the institutional practices and assumptions the editors found constraining in their psychiatric community, Sizofrengi sought to give the patient a space to speak for themselves in order to deconstruct the vaunted role of the psychiatrist in Turkey. But Sizofrengi also sought to appropriate the language of psychology and the “madnesses” of the patients it strives to cure in order to revitalize what the editors felt was a moribund literary culture. The journal gave a voice to marginalized, underground writers, critics, and film makers that would go on to become far better known outside the confines of the journals’ pages. While the resul...

This article examines the use of shadow, blur, graininess, and reflection in the work of the postwar photographers Robert Frank, William Klein, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard as a response to the rhetoric of Cold War containment. In contrast to the more comforting images in Edward Steichen’s popular exhibit The Family of Man, which sought to downplay Cold War anxieties, the photographs of Frank, Klein, and Meatyard challenged viewer expectation by presenting human figures in varying states of disintegration and disappearance. The term ‘subjective’ has long been used to describe a return to personal and private concerns during the postwar years, but discussion has focused mainly on the subjectivity of the artist rather than the viewer. By challenging the sanctity of the human figure, Frank, Klein, and Meatyard force viewers to confront such difficult images and, in the process, re-examine the fears and anxieties that lay dormant during the tense years of the early Cold War.

The Cold War was a time of strict binaries where the symbolic struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness played out in both public rhetoric and popular culture. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (US 1959–64) drew on this imagery to create a television show that explored the shaded areas where light and dark met. In order to discuss such delicate matters as nuclear anxiety, racial tension and suburban conformity, Serling asked viewers to journey into what he termed a ‘land of shadows’ where normal rules and expectations broke down. In The Twilight Zone , shadows became the site of a cultural critique that utilised these liminal spaces of ambiguity to challenge the dualistic thinking of the times. Although critics have discussed the show’s thematic content, little attention has been paid to The Twilight Zone ’s visual feel – a striking omission given the show’s title. The Twilight Zone was a provocative series where thematic content and innovative visual style were mutually reinforcing. Serling and his co-authors’ scripts offered strange, twisting tales that caught viewers off guard, forcing them to rethink commonly held beliefs. But the visual feel of the majority of the episodes, populated by shadow and chiaroscuro, worked in tandem with the show’s content to create a world where the common assumptions of the Cold War were interrogated and, oftentimes, overturned.

This article examines how Beat texts are received in Turkey as underground literature and what that reception reveals not only about the possibilities for cultural dissent in Turkey, but the extent to which the Beats are still capable of promoting social change in general. While translations of Beat Generation texts are a fairly recent phenomenon in Turkey, the internet has provided them with additional exposure, with the result that Beat texts play a role in discussions of the growing genre of underground literature in Turkey. This study analyses that role in order to discuss questions of commodification, transgression, censorship, and cultural difference that impact Beat texts in Turkey. Beat writers offer a form of resistance that allows Turkish readers to challenge mainstream values and mount legal challenges through the classic figure of the Beat rebel. This unique situation provides insight not only into the possibilities in culturally translating an imported counterculture, but also provide...

In his article "The Cultural Translation of Ginsberg's Howl in Turkey" Erik Mortenson examines three Turkish translations of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl in order to explore the ways in which Ginsberg's poem becomes redeployed in new cultural contexts. Orhan Duru and Ferit Edgü's 1976 translation presents a more politicized Ginsberg that draws on his anti-establishment credentials as a social activist. This comes as little surprise, since in pre-1980 coup Turkey rebellion was thought in purely political terms of right verses left. Hakan Arslan's 1991 update provides a less political and more familiar Ginsberg, in keeping with a society that left direct political struggle behind in favor of cultural politics. Şenol Erdoğan's version, published in 2013 by the controversial press 6:45, updated Ginsberg once again. Ginsberg became a marker of "hip," a spiritual guru who became equated with the mystical qualities of Sufism and Jalalad-din Mevlana Rumi. Tracing Howl's translation history provides a sense of recent Turkish cultural history. But it also allows Beat scholars to theorize how the reception of the Beats generates new versions, and thus new readings, of these countercultural texts.

This review compares Michael Soto's The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American Literature and Michael Hrebeniak's Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form in order to explore the role of bohemianism in modernist American literary movements. Both argue that such movements are formed as reactions to the prevailing social order, and seek to provide America with new cultural models. While Soto's work is somewhat ambivalent about the ultimate possibility of literary rebellion in the modernist period, Hrebeniak believes that Jack Kerouac and the "action writing" that he represents posed a direct challenge to post-World War II culture.

During the Depression era of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s, millions of Americans sought escape from the tumultuous times in pulp magazines, comic books, and radio programs. In the face of mob violence, joblessness, war, and social upheaval, masked crusaders provided a much needed source of security where good triumphed over evil and wrongs were made right. Heroes such as Doc Savage, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Captain America, and Superman were always there to save the day, making the world seem fair and in order. This imaginative world not only was an escape from less cheery realities but also ended up providing nostalgic memories of childhood for many writers of the early Cold War years.But not all crime fighters presented such an optimistic outlook. The Shadow, who began life in a 1931 pulp magazine but eventually crossed over into radio, was an ambiguous sort of crime fighter. Called "the Shadow" because he moved undetected in these dark spaces, his name provided a hint to his divided character. Although he clearly defended the interests of the average citizen, the Shadow also satisfied the demand for a vigilante justice. His diabolical laughter is perhaps the best sign of his ambiguity. One assumes that it is directed at his adversaries, but its vengeful and spiteful nature strikes fear into victims, as well as victimizers. He was a tour guide to the underworld, providing his fans with a taste of the shady, clandestine lives of the criminals he pursued. Relishing his role, the Shadow went beyond the simple exploits of a superhero like Superman, and even those he saved were not sure whether they would like to come across him on a dark night in a strange alley.This paper explores the role that the Shadow plays in the work of Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and the reasons these writers were attracted to him. At first glance, this seems an odd assortment of writers to bring together. Though these writers shared an interest in the confessional writing that gained momentum in the 1950s, their differences are more striking than their similarities. Plath, who married the British poet Ted Hughes and had two children, spent a good deal of time in England writing highly controlled verse. Kerouac, a peripatetic loner who celebrated America, insisted on spontaneous, free-flowing production. Baraka, an African American writer struggling with a racist America, eventually took the uptown train from the village to Harlem in order to produce more politicized work meant to directly affect his community. What unites these different writers is their mutual interest in the undercurrent of ambiguity that permeates the Shadow. All three writers penned tributes to this crime fighter, using him to examine the loss of childhood innocence and entry into the adult world. But the ambiguity the Shadow represented also provided a means of critiquing the binary dichotomies that helped define the postwar world. Plath, Kerouac, and Baraka used the Shadow to explore the obverse side of American optimism, simultaneously questioning the innocence of childhood and the conformism of America along the way.1The Shadow KnowsAlthough the pulps and the radio both shared the Shadow, the character manifested differently in each. In the pulps, the Shadow is part hardboiled detective and part mysterious avenger in equal turns. Lamont Cranston, his alter ego, is the same man about town as in the radio programs and resorts to the same type of deduction to solve his cases. But the pulp Shadow draws heavily on the detective novels of the period. He is tough, streetwise, and lives by his own code of vigilante justice outside the law. The pulp Shadow also has a stable of helpers (along with several alter egos) to do his bidding. He and his gang battle villains in streets and alleyways until the Shadow ends victorious, with the evildoers either dead or behind bars. The illustrations for the pulps likewise point to the influence of the hardboiled genre on Walter Gibson's writing [Figure 1]. …

This article explores attempts by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to transcribe their drug experiences onto the written page. Utilizing both Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on intersubjective communication and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of the “Body Without Organs,” it argues that by writing “through the body,” Kerouac and Ginsberg are able to transmit the physical and emotional effects of the drug experience to the reader via the medium of the text. The reader thus receives not just an objective account of the drug experience, but becomes privy to the alterations in temporal perception and intersubjective empathy that drug use inaugurates.