Allen Ginsberg And The Counterculture Movement

In the 1960 s,an influential counterculture movement was launched in the United States.This movement promotes the development of various social movements,including the strive for civil rights,woman's equality,anti-war and equality;on the other hand,it causes certain social ills,such as threats to marriage,family and social security caused by sexual freedom and drug abuse.Therefore,it is a must to view this movement objectively which is not only a social movement,an ideological and cultural movement,but a literary movement.The Beat Generation was both a product and a backbone force of the counterculture movement.And Allen Ginsberg(hereinafter referred to as Ginsberg),as the representative of the Beat Generation,is the soul and symbol of the movement.With his ground-breaking literary works,Ginsberg broke "the silence in the 50s",fully exposing the crises American society and American literature suffered after the middle of the 20 th century.His works brought a bold,bizarre atmosphere to the later American literature and even the global literature,broke the barriers of modernist poetry hosted by academism with Thomas Eliot as the representative at the beginning of the 20 th century.A deep and thorough transition in poetry was achieved.In a sense,the transition from modern to post-modern poetry is accomplished.In the meanwhile,Ginsberg's life style is distinctly characterized by post-modern subversion.He is wild and uninhibited,and he always persists in the strong resistance to centralization of authority and mainstream values in social life,showing a sharp-cut countercultural tendency.Therefore,in order to comprehensively and objectively understand and grasp Ginsberg's creation,and to deeply explore the social context of his creation and the potential relationship with his personal experience,we have to put him in the background of the counter-culture movement,and combine the theory and practice of this counterculture to study deeply.This paper puts Ginsberg's poetry creation in the 1960 s counterculture movement,from this macro perspective,and through looking back upon the causes and effects of the counterculture movement,to analyze the historical evolution and characteristics of the Beat Generation as the representative of the counterculture movement,and to probe into the countercultural characteristics of Ginsberg,the leader of the Beat Generation.By analyzing his poetry creating as a whole,from the ideological and artistic dimensions,the paper explores and taps into his rebellion and subversion against orthodox culture.While deepening the understanding of Ginsberg's works,we intend to provide references for understanding and grasping the evolution of postmodern literature.The introduction part of this paper first overviews the research status of this study at home and abroad,and makes the necessary explanations to the value and significance of this study.The first chapter mainly studies the causes and effects of the counterculture movement to understand its main forms of expression and its influence on later generations,so as to deduce the historical inevitability of Ginsberg's appearance.The second chapter,combining the development of the Beat Generation's literary practice,understands and grasps Ginsberg's thought evolution and the performance in the creation.Based on Ginsberg's poetry creation,the third chapter focuses on the analysis of Ginsberg's separation and rebellion against traditional literature,which is mainly reflected in the dissolution and subversion of grand narrative.The fourth chapter probes into Ginsberg's exploration in the poetry artistic forms,especially on the rebellion against the traditional poetry forms.The conclusion gives a simple summary of Ginsberg's creation and life experience to give enlightenment and warning to future generations.