Analysis On The Catharsis Function Of Allen Ginsberg’s Poem Howl

The Beat Generation was a group of American post-World War II writers and poets who came to prominence in the1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired. As the leading figure of Beat writer, Allen Ginsberg announced a literature and cultural reform with far-reaching influence by his representative work Howl. For a long time, however, a majority of literary critics applied a cultural perspective to conduct relating research on Howl by discussing its relationship with the Beat movement. Many other critics had a diachronic focus on linear relationship between William Blake, Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, to justify the position stood by post modern poets in the history of American literature. Those critics, who strongly opposed to take Ginsberg and his works serious, would bring on private issues in order to deconstruct every single meaningful text components into meaningless pieces. At the macroscopic level, the above views are beneficial to collateral information collection, rather than concentrate on characteristics and values of the poem itself. Different from previous perspectives, on the basis of the poet’s biography and Howl’s creating background, verbal text and content structure come to the first place in this thesis. Inspired by Aristotle’s catharsis function theory, the thesis writer analyzes catharsis function embodied in Howl from three aspects, namely sound, text and theme. First, on the basis of John Ransom’s "Structure/Texture" theory, the thesis writer proposes four characteristics of sound structure, which enlarges application of "texture" from detail to a macro level, and discusses the development of catharsis function within the frame of sound. Second, the thesis writer discusses connection between catharsis function and text as well as theme of the poem. By examining spontaneous writing principle followed by Ginsberg, this thesis makes a connection of it with the first person narrator and witness focalization functioned by the first two words of the poem. By applying the oral-anal desire of Freud five stages of psychosexual development theory, the thesis writer analyzes catharsis function implied by crazy verbs and dirty nouns of the poem. Additionally, by adopting anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown’s teasing relationship theory, the thesis writer explores thematized emotion of "excess" and "embarrassment" in Howl, and its position in illustrating catharsis function of the poem. The thesis writer proves that, catharsis function practiced by excessiveness and embarrassment shown in crazy verbs and dirty nouns in Howl shares the same position of pity and fear in Greek tragedy.