Post-Modern in Beat Generation Literature
Modernist literature is more openly emotional, confessional, and disjointed than the stodgy stuff that came out of the Victorian Era. It was spurred by the rapid development of new technologies during the 1900s, and the angst that World War I created.
So, modernist writers gave readers their first tastes of real human scandal: sex, alienation, revolution, class struggles, racial tension, and more. Post-modernism lived those scandals.
Post-modernists' work is unabashedly eccentric and experimental. Peeps like the Beats based their entire careers around a no-rules creative lifestyle, really—not just their art.
You won't be surprised to learn, then, that a lot of the Beats were inspired by famous modernists. William Carlos Williams was Allen Ginsberg's mentor at Columbia University. T.S. Eliot, also a modernist, heavily influenced William Burroughs.
See, the Beats danced all up on modernism, and turned it from a literary movement into just a movement—a fresh, new way of life.
Chew on This:
William Burroughs's Naked Lunch incorporates the post-modern technique of the cut-up, which is basically a fancy word for "collage." Originally the brain-child of visual artists like the Dadaists, this technique was taken up by Burroughs and applied to literature. Large portions of Naked Lunch are made from pieced-together sentences that Burroughs tore away from different works. Sweet.
Post-modernism is also all about burning down the barriers between highbrow and lowbrow art. The thing is, Beat literature is no-brow. Beat authors wrote about anything and everything, but especially whatever was taboo. Allen Ginsberg didn't want to settle for being modern—he wanted to dismantle all of modern society. He wanted to talk about his queerness. And the madness of society's social constraints that were killing off his family and friends. His poem "Howl" just might be the grandest expression of "WTF?" ever written. In that piece, the narrator is all, This is modern society? Really? I don't want any [insert string of curse words here] part in it then, thanks. And here we are. Still doing a lot of the things the Beats were so riled up about, actually…