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College Literature 32.2 (2005) 177-184



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Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Beats:

New Directions in Beat Studies

Skerl, Jennie, ed. 2004. Reconstructing the Beats. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $75.00 hc $24.95 sc. 244 pp.
Martinez, Manuel Luis. 2003. Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. $24.95 sc. 360 pp.

While the Beats' contemporaries generally dismissed them as "know-nothing" bohemians and "bewildered internal cosmonauts," scholarly interest in the Beat Generation has increased dramatically over the past two decades (Podhoretz 1958, 307, Fiedler 1971, 399). The principal Beat writers—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs—are now widely recognized countercultural heroes whose [End Page 177] works are routinely discussed in university classrooms and academic journals. Jennie Skerl's anthology, Reconstructing the Beats, and Manuel Luis Martinez's Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera both contribute to this Beat revival by attempting to map "new directions for criticism and teaching at the beginning of the twenty-first century" (Skerl 2004, 2). But what new directions should Beat scholarship pursue, and what is at stake in these attempts to reconstruct new paradigms for Beat studies?

In the broadest sense, Skerl and Martinez's works share several common theoretical assumptions that have guided recent Beat scholarship. Skerl argues that her anthology pursues two primary goals: it attempts to "re-historicize, re-contextualize, and reinterpret" the principal Beat writers—Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs—from new theoretical perspectives; and it also seeks to "recover marginalized figures" and expand the "restricted (white male) canon" beyond "a few legendary figures" (2004, 2). On the surface, Martinez's Countering the Counterculture seems to pursue a similar critical agenda with its first half analyzing how the major Beat writers responded to the "advent of conformist and corporate culture in the United States," while its second half explores how Chicano and Mexican American migrant writers "participate[d] equally and fully in the production" of post World War II American culture (2003, 14-15, 18).

The conclusions that Martinez draws, however, differ dramatically from the positions advanced in Skerl's anthology. While Reconstructing the Beats does "revise, broaden, and complicate" our understanding of the Beat Generation, it ultimately advances a rather traditional sense of the Beats as countercultural rebels (2004, 2-3). For example, Clinton R. Starr's essay expands the Beat Generation beyond a "small group of literary celebrities" to include a broader group of "beatniks and 'week-end Bohemians' who frequented coffeehouses and jazz clubs," but Starr still defines the Beat Generation as a "vibrant counterculture that facilitated individual resistance and collective political activism" (44, 41, 53). Similarly, Daniel Belgrad explores interesting new relationships between Beat literature and Mexican Magical Realism, but he ultimately concludes that both movements shared a "common cultural agenda" of opposing the "hemispheric dominance of corporate liberalism after 1940" (40). While both critics reconstruct the Beat Generation in new ways, they remain relatively faithful to a traditional sense of the Beats as "nonconformists" who "critique[d] . . . mainstream values and social structures" by promoting "spiritual alternative[s] to the relentless materialist drive of industrial capitalism" (2).

Martinez's Countering the Counterculture, however, radically challenges this traditional interpretation of the Beat Generation as an unproblematic counter-hegemonic [End Page 178] movement. Deconstructing "simplistic" views of post World War II American culture which posit a "binary opposition between the establishment culture and a dissenting counterculture," Martinez argues instead that a more complex relationship existed between the "square" mainstream culture and the Beat counterculture (2003, 7). Demonstrating that the "primary Beats" embraced many of the "reactionary, nativist, racist ideologies to which they have conventionally been contrasted," Martinez suggests that it is "possible that the Beats were not so much pitting their worldview against a vacuous, rigid, bourgeois conformity, but echoing, albeit dissonantly, the same tune as the chorus of reactionary elements of America in the 1950s" (25). Ultimately, Martinez redefines Beat culture altogether, arguing that it was "not at all 'countercultural'" but rather a...

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