Week Six: Howl, and the Generational Strategy to Cultural Work

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at the grave of Jack Kerouac 1975 by Ken Regan

The featured work we are reading this week is the long poem, Howl by Allen Ginsberg. A version of the text is available online at this link:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308

The link includes not only the print version of the poem but an audio recording of Allen Ginsberg reading the work. We will be considering this poem, the significance of what we came to call the "Beat" writers and the strategy of addressing a generational audience. Please read/listen to the poem before coming to class.

Required Film: Please watch Kill Your Darlings (2014) dir. John Krokidas starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsburg. 

We will have had two weeks since last we met so it is expected that you will have completed reading Siddhartha and posted your discussion about the experience of reading a particular passage, scene or segment of the work and your understanding of it. Feel free to express your personal connection to the portion of the text you are discussing.


Writing Assignment: Write an extended comment about a work or set of works you think embody the perspective of your generation. You might discuss what you are defining as the characteristics of your generation and how that is expressed in cultural works you respond to. Discuss a few specific works that in your opinion give "voice" to the outlooks and attitudes shared by your generation. Discuss how the specific work you've chosen is an exemplar of the characteristic(s) you've illuminated. Post your comment on Canvas in the a queue for the fourth assignment.

Week Five: Reading As Mind Expansion

This week we are reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. This is a short novel whose reading is intended to inform the actual practice of our lives. Not all books are designed to do this, but many texts are surrounded by a rhetoric of application that goes beyond entertainment--the idea that a text should be useful and an aid to the increase of our understanding of the world and the people in it.

During our discussion of the work in class, we will explore the nature of meaning in the work, how "meaning" is created by the narrative, and how that meaning might be applied. We must also consider how texts contradict themselves and offer a variety of doorways into multiple constructions of meaning. Please read the book before coming to class. If you have read it before, try reading it again and see if your idea of the book and its application to your life has changed since the first time you read it.

Writing Assignment #2:  This week please post your second writing in Canvas. Your writing should consider an extended passage or scene from either True Grit or Pride and Prejudice and the four levels of discourse the passage incites. Start with a restatement of text and then a description of what the text seems to be doing. Move on to an interpretation of the passage and finally discuss how this interpretation is affected by the elements of  mediation that contextualize the text. The target length for this exercise is about 500 words. 

No Class Next Week: Next week there will be no classes on Tuesday because of faculty professional day. There will be a writing assignment as well as an assignment to read "Howl" by Allen Ginsburg. We will discuss the poem in more detail in class in our next class meeting on Sept. 30.