Rebellion in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg M. A. Thesis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Allen Ginsberg's Poetry: A Form of Protest, Revolt, and Rebellion
Global Journal of HUMAN-SOCIAL SCIENCE: A Arts & Humanities - Psychology Volume 19 Issue 8 Version 1.0 Year 2019, 2019
Allen Ginsberg, one of the most rebellious poets in the history of American literature, throughout his life as a poet had taken poetry as a form of protest against different issues. These issues range from conventional societal norms, their justification instead of being suppressive and detrimental to the development of one's true self, to the hypocritical and arbitrary role of the contemporary American government. This paper aims to show how Ginsberg's poetry unmasks the true nature of all the oppressive operations of society and authority. Through the historical background and analysis of three of his poems, this paper also aims at showing the ways Ginsberg used poetry as a form of protest and rebellion against those operations that emphasize the arbitrary interest of the capitalistic society over individual selves, even at the cost of destroying them completely.
When Private is Public: The Functions of Madness in Allen Ginsberg's Poetry During 1956-1961
2019
America encountered considerable changes after WWII, recovering from the effects of the Great Depression and WWII while its people lived in paranoia of the Cold War. It was in this period that the Beat Movement arose as a form of counterculture defying the conventional values that they found limiting to the freedom of an individual. Allen Ginsberg gained public attention when his first book Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956. His poem “Howl” was praised for its frankness and straightforward contents while criticized for its obscenity, culminating in the court’s ruling the poem not obscene. This study delves into poems published in three of Ginsberg’s works — Howl and Other Poems (1956), Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), and Empty Mirror: Early Poems(1961)—in other to examine the functions of madness in his writings. By drawing connection to Ginsberg’s biography, letters between Ginsberg and friends, and his poetry, this paper scrutinizes social influences on the portrayal of the personal life and explores how Ginsberg use a story of his own or through a persona to portray and conceptualize madness. Madness in his poems could be observed through his poetic form, vulgarity in diction, radical contents, and the equivocation between the holy and the profane. It is found that Ginsberg does not only use madness to dedicate to an individual such as Carl Solomon in “Howl” and Naomi Ginsberg in “Kaddish”, but also uses it to address social issues on the topics of homosexuality, psychological traumas, freedom of expression and so on, the topics of which dominate the personal and public space but hardly spoken out publicly.
Alienation and dissent in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Fadhil Al-Azzawi
2020
APA Citation Geninah, F. (2020).Alienation and dissent in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Fadhil Al-Azzawi [Master’s thesis, the American University in Cairo]. AUC Knowledge Fountain. https://fount.aucegypt.edu/etds/826 MLA Citation Geninah, Farah. Alienation and dissent in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Fadhil Al-Azzawi. 2020. American University in Cairo, Master's thesis. AUC Knowledge Fountain. https://fount.aucegypt.edu/etds/826
A Spenglerian Re-reading of Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'
BAKEA - History in Western Literature, 2013
Re-reading Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem ‘Howl’ (1956) through the lens of Oswald Spengler, the article aims to identify a set of converging lines in the works of the poet and of the historian respectively. It traces the influence of Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918-22) on Beat writers and on Ginsberg in particular, who, in ‘Howl’, shares many of Spengler’s concerns: the myth of the primitive, the loss of the intuitive – seen as a spiritual vessel – and the dereliction of modernity. The article argues that, in ‘Howl’, the radical expression of the dialectical articulation between nature – made universal and ideal – and culture – rendered toxic and malevolent – gains poetical force when formulated on the mode of the prophetic.
Beyond Reason: Allen Ginsberg's Cultural and Communicative Revival of William Blake
The present paper uses Jan Assmann’s acceptance of cultural and communicative memory, intertwining them in order to attest the cultural and communicative revival of William Blake’s spiritual vision in the context of Allen Ginsberg’s conceptualization of post-war, American hyper-rationalization and the moulding of his Beat(ific) counterculture. Just as the English bard had had visions of his poetic predecessors, Ginsberg hallucinated of “Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war” and had a life-changing auditory experience that marked his calling to be a prophet. Blake’s Ginsbergian revival is both communicative and cultural because on the one hand it is inspired by a vision, a prophetic direct connection with the English bard that verbally communicated his personal representation of the past and on the other hand, Blake’s prophecies and influential literary writings render him a specialized bearer of memory and a shaper of cultural memory. As the destructive, egocentric, single-minded use of reason travels from Urizen to Moloch and from the Age of Reason to the Cold War years, so does the need to poetically prophesize the downfall of people who let themselves bound my “mind-forged manacles” and consequently forget about their inherent and infinite divinity. Echoing William Blake, yet adapting the poet’s philosophy to the cultural context of mid twentieth century America, Allen Ginsberg denounces the sleep of reason and the destructive power of the science of despair built upon the machinery of reason, as well as the resulted proneness towards egocentrism, materialism and conformism at the detriment of visionary imagination, spontaneity and spirituality.
Agony, Suffering and Spirituality in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl": A Comprehensive Study
Kazal Kumar Das, 2017
This paper examines Allen Ginsberg's portrayal of the "best minds" (nonconformists who have been rejected by society for their unwillingness to conform to its institutions and ideals) agony, suffering and apocalyptic views in the contemporary American mechanistic society from the recollections of "Howl". It also points out the seeking of spirituality in the face of imminent apocalypse and danger through the continuous tendency to shatter the dominant ideological structures, the dialectical movement of mystical illumination and shuddering ecstasy, the celebration of sexuality and phallic energy and the celebration of madness through different activities. Allen Ginsberg's bold literary use of autobiography (as a jew, homosexual and idiosyncratic communist) helps to justify the suffering and the resurrection. His personal life and eventful biography are deeply connected to this poem. The poem is a long wail and desperate howl against mechanistic civilization which destroys spirit and energy. It concentrates on the malady of exhaustation and the tension between the existential despair and the prophetic optimism of vision. It also focuses on how transcendence is always possible, even in the shattered universe of "Howl" through visionary experience, sex or chemical transformation of the psyche through drugs. The final images of "Howl" of the soul's possibility of resurrection spell out the central theme of the poem: the long agony and suffering transformed into the sweetness of love and renewal.
Emmanuel Levinas and Allen Ginsberg: Prophecy and Poetry
This paper is an exploration of the affinity between Levinas" ethics as metaphysics in Totality and Infinity and the ethical critique of American capitalism found in Allen Ginsberg"s Howl. In this paper I attempt to extend Levinas" account of the metaphysical structure of my relation to the Other into a means of criticizing the ethical axioms of contemporary social institutions. I draw upon both Levinas" work in Totality and Infinity and Ginsberg"s poem Howl.
Allen Ginsberg: Private Rebellion and Public Dissent
2011
Nutzungsbedingungen: Dieser Text wird unter einer Deposit-Lizenz (Keine Weiterverbreitung-keine Bearbeitung) zur Verfügung gestellt. Gewährt wird ein nicht exklusives, nicht übertragbares, persönliches und beschränktes Recht auf Nutzung dieses Dokuments. Dieses Dokument ist ausschließlich für den persönlichen, nicht-kommerziellen Gebrauch bestimmt. Auf sämtlichen Kopien dieses Dokuments müssen alle Urheberrechtshinweise und sonstigen Hinweise auf gesetzlichen Schutz beibehalten werden. Sie dürfen dieses Dokument nicht in irgendeiner Weise abändern, noch dürfen Sie dieses Dokument für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, aufführen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Mit der Verwendung dieses Dokuments erkennen Sie die Nutzungsbedingungen an. Terms of use: This document is made available under Deposit Licence (No Redistribution-no modifications). We grant a non-exclusive, nontransferable, individual and limited right to using this document. This document is solely intended for your personal, noncommercial use. All of the copies of this documents must retain all copyright information and other information regarding legal protection. You are not allowed to alter this document in any way, to copy it for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the document in public, to perform, distribute or otherwise use the document in public. By using this particular document, you accept the above-stated conditions of use.
Within the thought frame of Foucault and Derrida, post-structuralism serves as a methodology that could offer ways to study contemporary societies and their ways of looking at knowledge as a set of discursive formations when it comes to culture, language, and society. In relation to this perspective, poets Amiri Baraka, and Allen Ginsberg are important figures in the sense that they were interrogative for the taken for granted assumptions and practiced with language in their poetic aesthetics in order to deconstruct the discursive knowledge that is taken as absolute and necessary. As the American society was regulated by the dominant political ideologies that structured the predominance of patriarchy and white supremacy, they used language and poetry as their deconstructive methods in order to offer alternative texts that subverted these political and discursive structures and spoke for minorities that were excluded by these discursive formations.