Summary: Today we will look at postwar literature and the arts, focusing on the work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and touching on the artwork of the Abstract Expressionists. We will ponder the following question: Are literature, intellectual work, and the arts "the most intense expressions of an age"? We will look at how postwar literature, and particularly the work of the Beats, resisted dominant cultural conventions of the postwar moment. Among other things, as Kerouac's novel suggests, the postwar literary generation moved beyond a clear conception of the difference between good and evil to what Lionel Trilling termed "moral realism" - a conception of "good-and-evil." We will look both at contemporary critics' responses to On the Road and at the novel itself. Criticized for its irresponsibility and lack of structure, the novel is actually carefully structured around the friendship of Sal and Dean and the understanding of "good-and-evil" which Sal's shifting impressions of Dean afford.
I. Introduction: Are literature and art "the most intense expressions" of the postwar age?
A. New developments in art and literature after WWII
1. new cosmopolitanism and new nostalgia for the past
2. pre-eminence of American artists and writers
B. Postwar literature
1. reflects postwar affluence
2. modernist tone of despair
3. Lionel Trilling's concept of "moral realism"
II. Beat Generation
A. Characteristics of Beat literature
1. Kerouac's concept of "beat"
2. "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose"
3. Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956) as example of this
B. Critical opinion of Beat literature in the 1950s
1. characterization of Beat movement as undisciplined and irresponsible
2. extent to which contemporary criticism reflects cultural anxieties about youth
C. Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957)
1. structure of the narrative
2. narrative structure disrupts clear distinction between good and evil - enables appreciation for good-and-evil
III. Other Topics:
A. The Beats and jazz expression
B. Relation between Kerouac's notion of "spontaeous prose" and Pollack's notion of "action painting"