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Hipterism In Harlem

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In essence, ,,the 6 Gallery readings reveal how Beat and associated artists and audiences also tapped into this residual, insubordinate, and positive sense of jazz and expressed it through their art and lives.” (Whaley, 2004, p. 27) ,,The reading of Howl amplified vibrations sounding back to the jazz of renaissance Harlem, an era in which blues and jazz poets found themselves when much of the high culture’s generation.” (Whaley, 2004, p. 24)
Besides the jazz and bebop music, the generation of “crazy, no-good kids” (Russel, 2002, p. 16), appeared to be influenced in style and fashion as well. The style was noticed as riotous hipsterism or the anti-patriotist zoot suits. According to Kerouac, who sympathized with the hipsters, the Beat generation …show more content…

Derived from the slang word hip or hep, meaning “to know” or “to be aware, originally involved jazz musicians and their fans and followers”, hipsters form a subculture, ,,(black and white) who cultivated a distinctive style of dress, appearance, language, and behaviour.” (Stephenson, 2009, p. 5) Centred upon the jazz experience, hipsterism represented an opposition to the conventional puritanical attitude toward sexuality and drugs. ,, Hipsterism attracted and influenced the avant-garde and bohemian while it continued to attract followers from its traditional social groups. By the middle and late forties, hipsterism constituted a sort of cultural underground throughout the United States with international affiliations. The Beats assumed the role of literary advocates for this subculture, embracing and, at the same time, interpreting and transforming it.” (Stephenson, 2009, p. …show more content…

The literature of the Beatniks was written in a manner less to be read than heard. The breakthrough for the Beatniks represented the 6 Gallery readings in San Francisco. San Francisco was open to the Beat generation. Having presented the Ginsberg´s “Howl” protest poem, the Beatnik avant-garde group modelled into the ,,controversial symbols of a new generation” (Whaley, 2004, p. 10). Howl caused a sensation but was strictly denied as nonacceptable for the former society to hear and led to the court. Slovak publicist and author of many volumes of authentic dialogues with Slovak, Czech, European and American writers, interviewed Allen Ginsberg with questions concerning the Beat generation philosophy, formation of his poems Howl or Kadish, his teachers, writers or poets who inspired him, likewise his memories about visiting Prague. According to the poem Howl, Ginsberg interprets the poem as the expression of a real howl, as a reaction to ostensibly irresolvable, for him unbearable circumstances. Considering the position of literature, Ginsberg adds: ,,I was looking for the way how to release both my feelings of pain and helplessness, simultaneously to find a way how to shock but not weaken the power of a message. For a part of American society, literature is a redundant

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