Beat Generation

The Beat Generation was a literary movement that began in the early 1950s and ended in the 1960s in the USA. In the fiftieth, a group of young unpublished American writers came to the center of attention of media and instatly became a hit. It was not only a writing style, but a lifestyle as well, a fashion that marked the period. Terms such as “beatnik”, “beat”, and “beat generation” (meaning “exhausted") were part of the new American slang, defining “bad boys” in hostility to the Establishment. They abused drugs, practiced free sex, loved jazz, admired life on the road, and read poetry in crammed student apartments and coffee houses of Greenwich Village and San Francisco. The Beat Generation left only a few memorable works, but still, it was enough to mark a time of profound changes in American culture.

Main characteristics:

• Interest in personal relationship
• Expressing sadness due to the fade of love and passion
• Discovering bond between “the boys”
• Flirting with politics, sex, drugs, dreams
• Dedication to restlessness
• Impulsiveness
• No perfection of style

Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac

*A counterculture (also written counter-culture) is a subculture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, often in opposition to mainstream culturalmores.^[1][2]

A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes.

The counterculture of the 1960s (1964–1974) in America is usually associated with the hippie subculture.

The Vietnam War helped to push the counterculture farther toward a hatred of authority. This had already been happening to some extent as a reaction to what the counterculture people felt was the overbearing authority of their parents. But it grew as a response to the war. The people of the counterculture felt that the war was an example of how blind obedience to authority was ruining our civilization.

J.D.Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut

*American fiction after WWII - writings about traumatic war experience, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, Wind and War by Herman Wouk; writings about Southern life following Faulkner’s footsteps, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner; writings about Jewish experience (Saul Bellow, Issac Singer); writings about black people (Ralph Ellison); writings about the alienated youth, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger; writings about middleclass life (Updike)

*New Fiction – American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s proves to be different; writers like Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five), Joseph Heller (Catch22), John Bath, etc. shared almost the same belief that human beings are trapped in a meaningless world and that neither God nor man can make sense of the human condition.

Twentieth-century American Drama has gained itself an indispensable position in the world literature and also established its international reputation for its achievements in the realistic theatre, expressionist theatre, metatheatre and feminist theater that are rooted in American social reality. It produces a band of important playwrights, two NobelPrize laureates among them.

American realistic theatre features a genre of modern tragedy in the strand that starts with Eugene O’Neill, continues with Tennessee Williams and consummates with Arthur Miller, whose The Death of a Salesman depicts the social reality of ordinary American people. The legacy in preserved in the later generations of American playwright like Marsha Norman.

Expressionist theatre gained a firm foothold in U.S. since Eugene O’Neill thematically uses expressionistic devices in his Hairy Ape and other plays. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller also use their expressionist dramaturgy effectively in Glass Menagerie and The Death of a Salesman, respectively.

Metatheatrical arts are intensively and effectively invented by American playwright Thornton Wilder in his Our Town, an American classic that still holds the stage for nearly eighty years.

American feminist theater remains active in United States since 1970s. Marsh Norman’s ‘Night Mother is regarded as one of the most important plays written by women playwrights who notonly rival men playwrights with equally brilliant dramatic art but also improve American theaterwith a special insights of women playwrights.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31