The Beats - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 26
About This Presentation
Title:

The Beats

Description:

Brown vs the Board of Education (1954) Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955) ... From the Beats to the Hippies: a short step. From Pranksters to Protest. The end ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:251
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 27
Provided by: mcc7
Category:
Tags: beats | hippies

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: The Beats


1
The Beats
  • U.S.A.
  • 1950s

2
The decade of the 50s
  • The politics of fear
  • The homogenization of America
  • Resistance to conformity

3
The Cold War
  • Korean War the spread of Communism
  • The Space Race
  • Sputniks 1 2
  • The Arms Race
  • Los Alamos
  • A- H-Bomb testing

4
Major faces of the Cold War
5
The Cold War
6
Homogenization of Culture
  • TV, advertising, censorship
  • The first suburbia
  • Levittown, Long Island
  • McCarthyism and the thought police

7
TV advertising
8
Sex Censorship
9
Joseph McCarthy HUAC
10
Resistance
  • Desegregation
  • Brown vs the Board of Education (1954)
  • Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)
  • Desegregation of Central High, Little Rock,
    Arkansas (1957

11
More resistance
  • James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause
  • The Rise of a teenage subculture
  • The Beat Poets

12
The Beats
13
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
14
in Goyas greatest scenes . . .
  • In Goyas greatest scenes we seem to see
  • the people of the world
  • exactly at the moment when
  • they first attained the title of
  • suffering humanity
  • They writhe upon the page
  • in a
    veritable rage
  • of adversity
  • Heaped up
  • groaning with babies and bayonets
  • under cement skies
  • in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
  • bent statues bats wings and beaks
  • slippery gibbets
  • cadavers and carnivorous cocks
  • and all the final hollering monsters
  • of the
  • imagination of disaster

15
Goya contd
  • And they do
  • Only the landscape is changed
  • They still are ranged along the roads
  • plagued by legionnaires
  • false windmills and demented roosters
  • They are the same people
  • only further from home
  • on freeways fifty lanes wide
  • on a concrete continent
  • spaced with bland billboards
  • illustrating imbecile
    illusions of happiness
  • The scene shows fewer tumbrils
  • but more maimed citizens
  • in painted cars
  • and they have strange license plates
  • and engines
  • that devour America
  • 1958

16
A Coney Island of the Mind
  • See
  • it was like this when
  • we waltz into this place
  • a couple of Papish cats
  • is doing an Aztec two-step
  • And I says
  • Dad lets cut
  • but then this dame
  • comes up behind me see
  • and says
  • You and me could really exist
  • Wow I says
  • Only the next day
  • she has bad teeth
  • and really hates
  • poetry
  • 1958

17
Kerouac Burroughs
18
Allen Ginsberg
  • I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
    by madness, starving, hysterical,
  • naked . . .

19
Basic Principles
  • Existentialism
  • Mysticism
  • A return to 19th Century Romanticism
  • Society every where is in conspiracy against the
    manhood of everyone of its members
  • Ralph W. Emerson, Self-Reliance

20
Artistic principles
  • Break with European standards and formal
    aesthetics
  • Search for American rhythms, forms language (in
    jazz and blues)

21
Social Principles
  • Champions of individual freedom and expression
  • Opposed to any social control
  • Government
  • Business
  • Parental
  • Religious
  • Psychological

22
Radical principles
  • Evil defined as any force that fragments reality,
    making unity difficult
  • Redemption through immersing oneself in all
    experience

23
The path to transcendence
  • Through jazz
  • Through drugs
  • Through eastern religions

24
From the Beats to the Hippiesa short step
25
From Pranksters to Protest
26
The end
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com