AML 5027 Gontarski Fall 2022

Burroughs biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles has observed that “No longer a fringe phenomenon, the Beat Generation, and its leading proponents, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, are fully accepted as a well-defined literary movement alongside the Bloomsbury Group and the Lost Generation and possibly as the first home-grown one.” And literary theorist and philosopher Jeffrey Di Leo has observed on a more theoretical level that resonates with our department’s History of Text Technology and “What is a text” focus as well: “Most think that when a book is published it is complete. But what happens if this formula is reversed? Burroughs's genius may very well be discovering that the future of the book is the archive--a vast expanse of materials that are in continuous flux.” This course will test Miles’ assertion and Di Leo’s archival theorizing, including work in FSU’s own Burroughs archive, against a contemporary culture with little appetite for a literature that shocks, a literature that in its time was often censored. We will explore whether Beat literature is sustainable amid our current critical ecology or whether it has passed its sell-by date. And we will further explore the expanded Beat influence in the work of the US’s latest Nobel laureate in literature, Bob Dylan. That is, is Dylan, in his major works, a Beat poet? [Spoiler alert: “Yes.”]