The Philosophy of the Beats

The phrase "beat generation"—introduced by Jack Kerouac in 1948—characterized the underground, nonconformist youths who gathered in New York City at that time. Together, these writers, artists, and activists created an inimitably American cultural phenomenon that would have a global influence. In their constant search for meaning, the Beats struggled with anxiety, alienation, and their role as the pioneers of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The Philosophy of the Beats explores the enduring literary, cultural, and philosophical contributions of the Beats in a variety of contexts. Editor Sharin N. Elkholy has gathered leading scholars in Beat studies and philosophy to analyze the cultural, literary, and biographical aspects of the movement, including the drug experience in the works of Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, feminism and the Beat heroine in Diane Di Prima's writings, Gary Snyder's environmental ethics, and the issue of self in Bob Kaufman's poetry. The Philosophy of the Beats provides a thorough and compelling analysis of the philosophical underpinnings that defined the beat generation and their unique place in modern American culture.

The Philosophy and Non-Philosophy of Potato Salad
Laugh of the Revolutionary: Diane di Prima, French Feminist Philosophy, and the Contemporary Cult of the Beat Heroine
Beat u-topos or Taking Utopia on the Road: The Case of Kerouac and Kesey
Being-at-Home: Gary Snyder and the Poetics of Place
From Self-Alienation to Posthumanism: The Transmigration of the Burroughsian Subject
I am Not an I: Performative (Self)Identity in the Poetry of Bob Kaufman
Tongues Untied: Beat Ethnicities, Beat Multiculture
Joanne Kyger Descartes and the Splendor Of: Bridging Dualisms through Collaboration and Experimentation
John Clellon Holmes and Existentialism
Wholly Communion: Poetry, Philosophy, and Spontaneous Bop Cinema
High Off the Page: Representing the Drug Experience in the Work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Genius all the Time: The Beats, Spontaneous Presence and Primordial Ground
Spontaneity, Immediacy, and Difference: Philosophy, Being in Time, and Creativity in the Aesthetics of Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, and John Cage
Two Ways of Enduring the Flames: The Existential Dialectics of Love in Kierkegaard and Bukowski
Anarchism and the Beats
Between Social Ecology and Deep Ecology: Gary Snyder's Ecological Philosophy
William Burroughs as Philosopher: From Beat Morality to Third Worldism to Continental Theory