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Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Beats: New Directions in Beat Studies Skerl, Jennie, ed. 2004. Reconstructing the Beats. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $75.00 he $24.95 sc. 244 pp.
Martinez, Manuel Luis. 2003. Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. $24.95 sc. 360 pp.
While the Beats' contemporaries generally dismissed them as "knownothing" bohemians and "bewildered internal cosmonauts," scholarly interest in the Beat Generation has increased dramatically over the past two decades (Podhoretz 1958, 307, Fiedler 1971, 399). The principal Beat writers-Jack Kerouac, Alien Ginsberg, and William Burroughs-are now widely recognized countercultural heroes whose works are routinely discussed in university classrooms and academic journals. Jennie Skerl's anthology, Reconstructing the Beats, and Manuel Luis Martine/'s Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera both contribute to this Beat revival by attempting to map "new directions for criticism and teaching at the beginning of the twenty-first century" (Skerl 2004,2). But what new directions should Beat scholarship pursue, and what is at stake in these attempts to reconstruct new paradigms for Beat studies?
In the broadest sense, Skerl and Martinez's works share several common theoretical assumptions that have guided recent Beat scholarship. Skerl argues that her anthology pursues two primary goals: it attempts to "re-historicize, re-contextualize, and reinterpret" the principal Beat writers-Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs-from new theoretical perspectives; and it also seeks to "recover marginalized figures" and expand the "restricted (white male) canon" beyond "a few legendary figures" (2004, 2). On the surface, Martinez's Countering the Counterculture seems to pursue a similar critical agenda with its first half analyzing how the major Beat writers responded to the "advent of conformist and corporate culture in the United States," while its second half explores how Chicano and Mexican American migrant writers "participate [dl equally and fully in the production" of post World War II American culture (2003, 14-15, 18).
The conclusions that Martinez draws, however, differ dramatically from the positions advanced in Skerl's anthology. While Reconstructing the Beats does "revise, broaden, and complicate" our understanding of the Beat Generation, it ultimately advances a rather traditional sense of the Beats as countercultural rebels (2004, 2-3). For example, Clinton R. Starr's essay expands the Beat Generation beyond a...