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?Spain Beat: Influence and Assimilation of the Beat Generation in Spanish Poetry. PresenterEstíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Spain) Abstract InfoWhile 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). Digging the Digital: The Beats and Video Games PresenterTomasz Sawczuk University of Bialystok (Poland) Abstract InfoEver since setting their foot on the social and cultural landscapes of the post-war world, the Beats have been both the ...
