Chapter 11 opens and trains its focus on the 2 very particular members of “The Beats;” Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. After World War 2, this “group of Disenfranchised young writers” got together to “rethink their relationship with to American culture, to media and technology, and self-expression.” These two writers in particular created some very strong new ideas of expression. During this time, the civil rights movement was a very big deal with people often coming very heated over the subject. Kerouac chose this time to write a book exploring a relationship between a white male an a black woman. Throughout the story, those themes of racism became very prevalent. While having a strong civil rights, the book is also has a very modern style, often jumping from one sentence to another in a very stream of consciousness style. Kerouac uses a strong sense nostalgia throughout his works as well. While using these past events as happy memories, they are also usually social critiques.
“Burroughs’s work addresses the influence of media and government on culture.” Burroughs created the “Cut-up” to reveal other possible meanings within texts. The idea is to take words or parts of a writing and then mix it up, and recombine it to make something completely different. Since we don’t think about how are lives are affected by writing, the idea of the “Cut-up” helps us examine the structure of a piece of writing. Through this analysis, we are often times forced to look at things that we would not normally associate with each other, giving a completely new perspective on it. Burroughs also presents the idea of a tape recording experiment, which is a way to get an idea of the views and the environment of a moment in time.
Scratching forms an interesting view of modern technology mixing with old to make a new kind of entertainment. It takes an older technology (The record, and player) and is used in a new form. a form that could be considered similar to The works of the Beats we discussed before. It is a stream of consciousness changing of music from moment to moment. It provides a totally new form of entertainment pulled and remixed right from the old technology.
