Matthew S. Monahan
1.1 Statement of Context
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Their [the Beats] politics were not leftist as much as libertarian and the purpose
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was to rouse, to challenge, to question the changes caused by new technolo
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gies, to help Americans remember that this too was once a place where men
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could dream of a better future (Knight 1988, pg. X).
The American Dream has a starring role in New Haven's eleventh grade English curriculum. One of its "Essential Question(s)" is "What does it mean to be an American?" For the Beats it apparently meant to rebel against suburbia and the conventional/traditional types of work that were necessary in order to participate in the capitalist consumer culture that it represents (Charters, xx). One might argue, that there has never been a better time to teach or study the Beats, than there is now; the real estate bubble has burst, the Big Three automakers are going down and American troops continue to rack up casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is it ironic that Edward Foster firmly identifies the Beats as being a small cluster of writers (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso) situated in NYC specifically? For NYC is home to both Wall Street and Ground Zero.
It has been said that one of the reasons that the Beats are so widely ignored by academics is because of their antiestablishment ethos. The larger question for me is, is their work teachable? What is my motivation? I claim that it my wish to find high interest literature that will fit the larger context of the curriculum. What evidence do I have that the Beats are capable of peaking my students' interests and why is it that high interest selections have become such a concern of my colleagues and mine? Although this last question, may for the time go unanswered, I do believe over the course of my reading and research, the answer to whether or not their work is teachable is a resounding "Yes!"
The argument has been made that the teaching of Beat literature may be perilous in that one's students may adopt the Beat attitude and use it an excuse for not completing assignments or even skipping class; however, Foster points out in his Understanding the Beats that almost all of the core members of the group were Ivy League educated,
Columbia had taught Kerouac and Ginsberg the classics but Burroughs [who had studied anthropology at Harvard and later medicine in Vienna (Miles 329)] showed them what had been left out- Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Celine, Kafka, Cocteau and other modern writers (5).
Although the term beat appears to have broad application going beyond the movements founding fathers and the fringe characters with whom they associated and from whom they drew inspiration e.g. Neal Cassidy, Herbert Huncke, Bill Cannastra et al., the Beat Generation is generally used to describe the big four who ended up dedicating their lives to literary pursuits.
In my four years as a professional educator I have taught very few examples of Beat literature; therefore, I have included reflections on my teaching of other modernist and postmodernist writers, most notably Toni Morrison. In his book Beat Collection editor Barry Miles discusses how the Beats "challenged existing literary forms" (xvii), Morrison, particularly in her novel The Bluest Eye, appears to be an inheritor of their experimental writing styles. In terms of its high-interest appeal my students were split on Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Morrison made some interesting choices in terms of blending "[the] speakerly, [the] aural, [the] colloquial" (Morrison 215) and other language; her use of typography whether it be italics, absence of punctuation (and sometimes even spacing) or the ever-shifting justified/unjustified right margin (signifying the shift in perspective) appeared to me, even now, twenty plus years later, quite innovative. And so, her novel is undoubtedly modern, if not entirely successful in terms of meeting its author's stated purpose of breaking the narrative into parts that required reassembly on the part of its readers so that they would not be led "into the comfort of pitying her [Pecola] rather [than] into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing" (211).
Although Morrison wrote her novel in the 1970s, its narrative takes place in the year 1941, approximately a decade before Kerouac cemented his status as the symbolic father of all things Beat with the publishing of his novel On the Road; I have noticed that some anthologies (e.g. McDougall Littell's The Language of Literature) place certain works according to their settings rather than their dates of publication (i.e. Arthur Miller's drama The Crucible appears amidst Colonial works rather than alongside those of his contemporaries). This issue is not as complex for Beat writings in as much that they were not writing historical fiction. However, Miller's examination of our nation's Puritanical roots would make a nice precursor to the study of Beat literature especially in light of its antiestablishment ethos.
I currently teach three sections of junior level/eleventh grade English and a course entitled Visual Art and Literature. Although the focus of the eleventh grade curriculum is American literature I do find it helpful to contrast texts (print and non print) with those from other parts of the world especially those that deal with similar themes and motifs. In my experience I have found that modern and contemporary works generate a higher level of interest among my students than those that predate the Great Wars. My participation in this seminar has provided me with the opportunities to consider modernism on a deeper level and to explore the motivations of twentieth-century artists whether they were members of the Beat Generation disillusioned with post-New Deal America or the New York School gravitating toward abstraction.
Before studying education I studied studio art and art history at Hunter College, CUNY (City University of New York). This experience profoundly enriched my life and further developed my analytical and critical reasoning skills, two areas in which my students need support. My curriculum unit focuses on student development in these areas through the study of such modern masters as Pollock, Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al.
1.2 Descriptive Overview and Long Term Plan
As previously noted, in the context of this unit, the Beat Generation is a term by which Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso may be referred collectively; however, the study of these four writers is book-ended by the inclusion of Thomas Wolfe and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Although Jones was not a core member of the group, his activities in New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood have often given rise to his labeling as beat.
As Foster states,
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These four writers [Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso] are in many ways
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so distinctively individual that at times it may seem that the entire beat move
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ment were nothing but a journalists or a critics fantasy. Nonetheless, when one
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puts [their work]… next to… John Updike, Saul Bellow… Anne
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Sexton… it is clear that [they] do comprise a separate group, not only
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because they strongly encouraged and influenced each other aesthetically but
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also because they shared a particular attitude… about what they felt had
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gone wrong with America (pp. 4-5).
The works I have selected for inclusion in this unit of study do not all explicitly state what exactly that was that "had gone wrong with America." Kerouac's piece "The Jazz of the Beat Generation" is rather a celebration of or rather an antidote to it. It is my belief that it is in the poetry of Ginsberg ("America"), Corso ("The Bomb") and Baraka/Jones (both "Preface.." and "Somebody Blew Up America") that these wrongs are more fully realized and explored. This leaves Burroughs, who although is identified as a core member of the Beat Generation is nonetheless an outsider, and is the Beats' one member whose work most clearly fits the postmodern paradigm. What it is to be modern, and the disambiguation between it and postmodern, were concepts that I clearly struggled with early in my research.
Serendipitously I stumbled upon an article in an old New Yorker (would that qualify as a back-issue?) about a dinner party hosted by David Barthelme. Not long before I had updated my FB (facebook) status as: Matthew Monahan is contemplating what it is to be postmodern; and eureka, I've found it, or at least I found a dueling banjos theoretical approach:
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Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It's definitionally
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overloaded, it can do almost any job you need done. This is partly because, like
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many terms that begin with "post," it is fundamentally ambidextrous
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Postmodernism can mean, "We're all modernist now. Modernism has won." Or
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it can mean, "No one can be a modernist anymore. Modernism is over" (Menand
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2008, pg. 68).
I could not help but be transported back to the fall of 1990 when I was first introduced to the concept of "-isms" in Marshall Fishwick's Introduction to Humanities and the Arts course at the university most commonly referred today as Virginia Tech. There with the help of Socrates, Robert Hughes, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman et al I began to ask the Big Question, why?
It seems to me there can be only one logical solution, regardless of what texts one decides to teach, if the unit is to be an exploration of modernism and contemporary art, the culminating activity must be a multi-genre paper. I have struggled with the how. How do I engage students while exposing them to modern literature and art of the twentieth century? The cliché, "Teach what you love and love what you teach," is often bandied about in educational circles, and this is all well and good, as long as your (teacher/facilitator) enthusiasm is infectious and the work being explored is able to transcend student ennui.
I originally intended to focus primarily on Kerouac's On The Road; however, I think I have stumbled onto something more exciting, a thematic unit for the teaching of American literature from the 1930s into the twenty-first century: Wolfe (Piggy Logan/Alexander Calder), Kerouac ("Jazz of the Beat Generation")/Pollock, Ginsberg ("A Supermarket in California" and "America") and Jones/Baraka ("Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" and "Somebody Blew Up America").
