Norman Bodhretz
Norman Bodhretz is an important critic who specializes in the study of the "Beat Generation". He studied at Columbia University, where he met Ginsberg and Kerouac. Some of his poetry collections from his student years were published with the help of Allen Ginsberg. Later, Baldhretz became the editor of the neoconservative journal Annotation.
In 1948, he published an article entitled "The Know-Nothing Bohemian" in the magazine "Partisan Review". In the article, he commented on the "Beats":
"Kruac's works contain a suppressed cry: kill those intellectuals who speak clearly, kill those who have People who sit patiently for 5 minutes. "
"These cynical people in the 1950s were the enemies of civilization. They worshiped primitivism, which was an act of spiritual rebellion from a disadvantaged group. . ”
“I think there is a close connection between the weakness of the American middle class and the prevalence of juvenile crime in the 1950s, but I also believe that part of the reason for juvenile crime comes from these people’s disregard for routine. Emotional resistance, and the effort to adapt to the world with their own knowledge. These people are undoubtedly followers of Kerouac and Ginsberg."
"To resist the Beat writers. point of view, we must reject the view that 'broken' is better than 'coherent', that 'ignorance' is better than 'knowing', and that the experience of mind and observation is a kind of 'death'..."
Ginsberg
In 1958, Ginsberg responded to this in an exclusive interview with "Village Voice" magazine:
"Novel is not a representation of fictional facts. It is a fictional description, but an expression of a person's true feelings. Baldhretz has never written prose, and he does not know how to write prose at all. He has no interest in the writing skills of prose and poetry. The criticism of creative experiments shows that he does not distinguish between words as rhythm and words as meaning. He accuses us of anti-intellectualism, which is purely false. We received the same education and studied in the same school. , we are all so-called "intellectuals", and the concept of "intellectuals" exists objectively. Baldhretz knows nothing about 20th century literature, and he is using his 18th-century mind to analyze 20th-century literature today. Literature is very different from the past. Our era already has Proust, Woolf, Faulkner and Joyce.”
Mainstream academia
In mainstream Western academic circles, there are still different opinions on the evaluation of the "Beat Generation". On the one hand, the cultural views of the participants in this genre are so extreme that they oppose all norms recognized by society. They even express their attitudes that are contrary to mainstream culture by personally practicing indulgence, crime, drug abuse and other behaviors; on the other hand, These writers all come from the post-war elite class of the United States, and their literary creations have a significant sense of elites. This makes the genre itself a contradiction. However, from the perspective of literary history alone, the "Beat Generation" is one of the most influential schools of postmodernist literature after World War II and has made a huge contribution to the development of 20th century literature. The creations of Kerouac, Ginsberg and others have been listed among the most outstanding works in the history of English literature, and their influence on American literature and American culture continues to this day.