Benjamin J. Heal and Erik Mortenson present an EBSN panel titled "Beat Internationalism" for the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, April 2021. The recording of day 1, featuring Sonya Isaak and Esther Marinho Santana was unfortunately lost.

Abstract:

The Beat Generation as literary movement is usually regarded as quintessentially American, rooted in the great American tropes of free expression, border crossing and anti-materialism. Often overlooked in favor of other literary movements, this seminar proposes to look beyond the familiar figures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to investigate the relations between their works, aesthetics and techniques and those of Beat voices from across the globe. The shock waves of Howl's radical poetics, publicized via the anti-obscenity court case, and the success of On the Road, reverberated globally, and can be seen to form a foundation for experimental, politically radical works published around the world. Building on the developing and widening formulations of ‘Beat’ by scholars such as Jimmy Fazzino, this seminar will work towards a definition of ‘Beat Internationalism’ as applied to the works examined, and consider areas of convergence. More theoretical questions pertaining to the transnational turn in American literary studies, and the para-textual nature of Beat literature are also welcome. The Beat legacy continues to be felt across popular culture; with retrospectives and exhibitions featuring work by the Beats continuing to be a success. What do the Beats mean to contemporary audiences, and how are their techniques and styles employed in the works of contemporary writers and artists? How has the radicalism of the Beats manifested internationally?

Presenter

Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo

Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Spain)

Abstract Info

While the Beat Generation foundational texts were published in the mid to late 1950s – Howl (1956); On the Road (1957); and Naked Lunch (1959) – one had to wait over a decade for the first serious translations of Beat poetry to crack through a Spain still under Franco’s dictatorship. As if slipping through the fissures of the “apertura” (opening), the so-called diplomatic and economic new phase of Franco’s regime, Beat poetry started to slowly but steadily infiltrate the Spanish poetic sphere.

Nowadays, six decades after the first hints and murmurs about Beat poetry in Spain, a Beat ethos reverberates ever so strongly in different generations of Spanish poets. Beatitud: Beat Generation Visions (2011) and Hey Jack Kerouac: Beat Footprints in Spanish-speaking Poetry (2017), two recent anthologies which collect Spanish and Latin American poets directly influenced by the Beat Generation, attest to the still growing relevance of the Beat Generation across international waters. As the more than sixty poets included in their pages show, and as collections such as A. Robert Lee’s The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature (2018) or Erik Mortenson’s Translating the Counterculture (2018) also demonstrated, the Beat movement, more than quintessentially American, translates well internationally.

This presentation maps the influence and assimilation of the Beat Generation in Spanish poetry. After a brief contextualization of the Spanish literary scene when the first Beat encounters took place, this presentation focuses on the different ways in which contemporary poets such as Uberto Stabile (1959), Ángel Petisme (1961), Antonio de Egipto (1975), or Mónica Caldeiro (1984), transpose Beat aesthetics, themes, and sensibilities into their poetry. Through varied and heterogeneous strategies, these and other Spanish poets revisit and revive the Beat poem to fit their own artistic vision.

Speaker Bio

Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, currently a lecturer at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Spain), specializes in gender and feminist discourses in postwar and avant-garde American poetry. Her research focuses on the poetry and art of poets like Anne Waldman, ruth weiss, Joanne Kyger, and Diane di Prima. Recent publications include “Shifting the Mythic Discourse: Ambiguity and Destabilization in Joanne Kyger’s The Tapestry and the Web” (Amaltea, 2020), “Intertextuality in Diane di Prima’s Loba: Religious Discourse and Feminism” (Humanities, 2018), “Beat Affinities in Spanish Poetry” (The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Poetry, 2018) and “Femmes: la Beat Generation (re)revisitée” (Beat Generation, 2018). She’s also coeditor of ruth weiss: Beat Poetry, Jazz, and Art (De Gruyter, to be published in 2021).

Presenter

Tomasz Sawczuk

University of Bialystok (Poland)

Abstract Info

Ever since setting their foot on the social and cultural landscapes of the post-war world, the Beats have been both the subject of and subject to pop-cultural representations and appropriations. While figurations of Beat sensibility in film, television, press and popular music have been well recognized and analyzed, just to mention the scholarly work of David Sterritt and Simon Warner, a field which remains uninvestigated for Beat influences, perhaps due to its relatively short pop-cultural presence, is the one of visual games. Recent years, which mark the release of titles like Fallout 4 (2015) and Life is Strange (2015), attest to a certain amount of interest invested in Beat mythos by the biggest game studios in the world and thereby open a new chapter in representing the Beats in visual media. By, on the one hand, setting the modes of Beats’ presence in the aforementioned video games against the backdrop of existing models of (mis)appropriating Beats in visual culture and, on the other, employing Derridean hauntology and Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of retrotopia, the paper will seek to map out how and why video games designers venture into the Beat world.

Speaker Bio

Tomasz Sawczuk is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philology, the University of Bialystok (Poland). He is the author of On the Road to Lost Fathers: Jack Kerouac in a Lacanian Perspective (2019), he has also co-edited Visuality and Vision in American Literature (2014). His most recent research interests revolve around concrete poetry, intermedia and experimental literature.

Presenter

Erik Mortenson

Lake Michigan College

Abstract Info

If countercultural literature is meant to “counter” a culture, what happens when another culture borrows that critique? This essay addresses that question by examining the cultural translation of the Beat Generation in Turkey. The transnational turn has produced a multitude of important studies that examine the role of the international in the writing and lives of the Beats. It is surprising, however, how few of these studies address the question of either literary or cultural translation, especially given that the Beats enjoy an increasingly global circulation. Although Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were the only Beat writers to actually visit Turkey, since the 1990s publishers, editors, critics, readers, and others dissatisfied with what they feel to be a more conservative trend in the country have turned to the Beats and other countercultural forebears for alternatives. This unexpected return of Beat nonconformity and protest into new cultural and temporal conditions offers a unique opportunity to rethink both the cultural logics that made the Beats possible in the first place, as well as the possibilities they might still hold for social critique in our highly-globalized 21st century. Drawing on concrete examples from the translation history of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the discussion of the concept of the “hobo” in Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road, and on the recent censorship trial of William S. Burroughs’s Soft Machine, this paper argues that Beat concepts such as personal freedom, spatial mobility, and the importance of the individual that may seem self-evident in a Western context become rearticulated when deployed in the Turkey, allowing us to better understand how we have arrived at our present understanding of the Beats and how we have chosen to frame their social and literary relevance.

Speaker Bio

Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, translator, writer, and writing center consultant at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mortenson spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany before journeying to Koç University in Istanbul to help found the English and Comparative Literature Department. Mortenson has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three books, including Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). Mortenson is also an avid translator whose work has appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines, and he is currently translating the work of Necmi Zekâ for a book-length project.

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