The Beats as Cultural Others/Exotics in Recent Memoirs by Exile Poets

Thirty-fourth Annual 20th Century Literature and Culture Conf., Louisville, February 23-25, 2006

Poets who have come to the USA during the 1950s and 60s as expatriates or exiles from central European countries dominated by Communist regimes have often looked to Beat Generation writers as role models and inspirational figures. This is no doubt due to the spirit of individuality, non-conformism and jubilant celebration of difference and otherness which permeates the writings of poets such as Allen Ginsberg, and which resonated with dissident poets often oppressed by totalitarian regimes.

  

Authors such as Andrei Codrescu and Charles Simic have published memoirs and poems detailing their fascination with figures associated with the Beat Generation. This paper examines the representation of Beat writers such as Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in Codrescu and Simic’s texts, and argues that the exile poets overlay the well-known figures of the Beat writers with yet another dimension of otherness and exoticism, in effect mirroring themselves and their own identity struggles as European exiles in these American dissident and non-conformist figures.

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