Beats for Beginners

Facilitator: Charlie Huisken

To register call Charlie at: 416-929-9912.

This course on Beat Culture is much different than the one offered in the spring in that it will try to provide more context for that movement/development. Secondly, it will focus on the four major works by the three main figures of the Beat Movement: Howl and Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. These two goals will entail going back and forth between culture of the forties and fifties and previous bohemias, countercultures and romantic movements. This past spring I was often asked about the literary establishment against which the Beats were rebelling, and the course this fall will address that question.

Vital Reading:

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Kaddish

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Supplementary Readings:

• Ann Charters, editor, The Portable Beat Reader
• Max Blechman, ed., Revolutionary Romanticism
• Marshal Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air
• Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years
• Jonah Raskin, American Scream
• William Blake, The Complete Poems
• Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen; Twenty Prose Poems, and The Painter of Modern Life
• Penguin Collection, English Romantic Verse
• The Portable Walt Whitman which includes Specimen Days

WEEK BY WEEK SYLLABUS (Thursdays starting September 16 to November 18)

1. New York in the forties and fifties

2. William Blake and the English Romantics

3. and 4. Howl and Kaddish

5. Whitman's Specimen Days

6. and 7. On the Road

8. Baudelaire's prose poems and essays of modernism

9. and 10. Naked Lunch

Course Time and Place:

Thursdays evenings from 7:00 until 9:00 Starting September 16, 2004 at 483 Church Street (south of Wellesley) above This Ain't the Rosedale Library