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Ethnos and the Beat Poets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Steve Harney
Steve Harney
Affiliation:
Steve Harney is completing his doctorate in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RQ, UK.
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Extract

Rising from the streets of New York with his songs like Caruso or Sinatra, but in words. “Sweet Milanese hills” brood in his Renaissance soul, evening is coming on the hills. Amazing and beautiful Gregory Corso, the one and only Gregory the Herald.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , December 1991 , pp. 363 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 While I wish to avoid the constricting term “ethnic literature,” I do not want to deny ethnic content, as I believe is the case with the reductionist view presented in Sollor, Werner's Beyond Ethnicity (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar. Sollor”s study is helpful in identifying and reconstructing common myths as unifiers in American literature from the Puritans to Malcom X. However, Sollors admits in his introduction that his study emphasizes “the whole balloon.” I want to suggest in this study that there exists powerful decentralizing tendencies in American ethnicity, but at the same time, these tendencies become too unstable to support the writer's imagination.

2 For two discussions on this terminology see Greeley, Andrew, Ethnicity in the United States (New York, 1974)Google Scholar and Apter, David, The Politics of Modernisation (Chicago, 1965), 314Google Scholar. Greeley, , as a “new ethnic,”Google Scholar believes that the renewal of ethnic consciousness is entirely substantive, and consequently he sees no difference between the processes of ethnogenesis and ethnicization. Apter's view is closer to the one in this paper when he suggests that the idea of being a member of an ethnic group is different from the ideology of having to act on the idea.

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