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Beat Generation
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Many other French writers still active in the 1950s had a tremendous impact on the writing of the Beat Generation, writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Jean Genet. Older French writers rank high on the list of shared Beat influences: Apollinaire, for example. Beats ... repeatedly invoke the spirit of Symbolists such as Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.
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Like the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s, the American "Beat Generation" of the 1950s names both a literary current and a broader cultural phenomenon or mood. Rejecting the conformism and stress on "normality" of the Truman and Eisenhower years, the Beats emphasized an openness to varieties of experience beyond the limits of middle-class society; they explored the cultural "underground" of bebop jazz, drug use, "polymorphous perverse" sexuality, and non-Western religions.
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A sensationalist Hollywood interpretation, The Beat Generation (1959), made an association of the movement with crime and violence, as did The Beatniks (1960). The notion of violence or other criminality possibly arose because hardcore outlaws and criminals were popularly portrayed as using many of the same jive terms in their speech, and this distortion could ... be seen in popular TV shows with regard to hippies a few years later.
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Echoes of the Beat Generation run throughout all the forms of alternative/counter culture that have existed since then (e.g. "hippies", "punks", etc). The Beat Generation can be seen as the first modern "subculture". See the "Influences on Western Culture" section below.
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"Heroic Rick Peabody helps rescue the women of the Beat Generation from the neglect accorded them as being, in Joyce Johnson's words, Minor Charaters. Hardly surprising considering the position of women through the ages. Yet, the women are there, responding to and adding special qualities to 'the call'....The writings are provocative in themselves; they are indispensible for a full sense of the significance of the Beats in a world of men and women."
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After discussing particular works students should have a basis of what the Beat Generation was like. The teacher will randomly assign students to groups of 3 or 4 students (no more than 4 for participation reasons). From their previous knowledge and class periods, students will then brainstorm in a group as to what a "Beat Generation" of today would write about.
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Beat Generation