A Poetics of Resistance: The Postmodern Ginsberg

Abstract

The term postmodernism traces back to Irving Howe in the late 1950s, and gained currency with Leslie Fiedler and Ihab Hassan in the 1960s (Huyssen 256). Since that time the term has lost much of its radical bite, and is often (as with Habermas) viewed as a conservative sheep in wolf's clothes. Huyssen contends that "the adversary and critical element in the notion of postmodernism can only be fully grasped if one takes the late 19508 as the starting point of a mapping of the postmodern" (267). The early career of Ginsberg bears this out. Ginsberg's personal transition from Beat withdrawal into the involved, critical climate of the 1960' s counter-culture coincided with his return from the Orient to a very different America. As Bruce Cook describes it, no one "talked much about the Beat Generation anymore, but that didn't mean that he and Kerouac and Corso and all the rest had gone unheeded. The Hippies and Yippies of the 1960s appropriated the Beat message and agenda and made them their own. They welcomed Allen Ginsberg as a guru ... "