Chicago panels illustrate new avenues for scholarship in Beat archives and trauma
Beat Studies was well represented at the annual American Literature Association convention in Chicago on May 22–25, 2024. The BSA’s two panels during the 35th iteration of the conference showcased an expansive examination of Beat Literature.
If there was one overriding idea from the session “Beating Through the Archives: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso,” chaired by Don Heneghan (independent scholar), it was that Beat archives could open significant new avenues in scholarship. In “Is the Sea Really So Bad?: The Untold Story of Jack Kerouac and Big Sur,” Brett Sigurdson (Metropolitan State University) used Kerouac’s unpublished journals to examine how the narrative of Jack Duluoz’s breakdown in Big Sur differs—sometimes significantly— from Kerouac’s lived experience at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s coastal California cabin, illustrating the degree to which Kerouac fictionalized his life in his novels.
Similarly, Stevan M. Weine (University of Illinois College of Medicine) drew from Ginsberg’s voluminous archives to explore the Beats’ tepid relationship to psychiatry in “Trauma, Struggle, and the Beat Literary Imagination.” Considering the prominent Beat artists who struggled with mental illness—Ginsberg, Corso, William S. Burroughs, Bob Kaufman, and Diane di Prima among them—and in recognition of the overlapping definitions of “Beat” and “trauma,” Weine argued that writers like Ginsberg might have much to teach us about how to use art to confront trauma. He also discusses this subject in his BSA-Award winning book, Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness.
Finally, in “The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship: Gregory Corso Meets Allen Ginsberg,” Kurt Hemmer (Harper College) mined the writers’ respective archives to tell the story of how the two poets—who had one of the great platonic, artistic love affairs in literary history—met in the fall of 1951, which was a year later than the origin story told.
In the subsequent discussion, the panelists explored specific ways trauma influenced the art produced by these writers, noting how this topic could lead to further academic inquiry. So, too, was the potential for new and important scholarship on the Beats by exploring their vast archives.
In the BSA’s second session, “Discovering Some New Unspeakable Visions: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg,” Nicholas Skaldetvind (University of North Dakota) examined different ways in which Kerouac develops and uses the spontaneous poetics for which he is most famous in the letters he wrote before fame. Skaldetvind notably emphasized Kerouac’s literary mastery and his awareness of spontaneity, arguing that Kerouac’s letters deserve fresh scrutiny as an often-overlooked literary form.
In “Self-Invented Yankee Tantra: The Dharma of William S. Burroughs,” Robert W. Jones II (Louisiana State University, Eunice) explored how William S. Burroughs’s preoccupation with systems of control led him to explore alternatives to the written word as a means to communicate more directly with the readers’ bodies as well as their minds. By focusing on the esoteric ideas that flow into Burroughs’s work via the influence of Alfred Korzybski, Wilhelm Reich, W. Grey Walter, and Vladimir Gavreau—as well as the influence of Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique—Jones argues that Burroughs developed a system that he felt would cut through his audience’s consciousness and lead to freedom from control.
The next annual ALA conference will take place in Boston from May 21–24, 2025.
