The first presenter, Brett Sigurdson, will further the work of extracting the reality of Kerouac’s work and its reception since the publication of On the Road from the legends and prejudices that have enveloped it. To accomplish this, Sigurdson will explore sales data, royalty figures, scholarly publication data, and personal records; his aim is to help scholars better frame the original conditions of Kerouac’s reception while exploring themes that influence discussions of his work in contemporary scholarship. For example, at the time of Kerouac’s death in 1969, when he was nearly forgotten by readers and critics, almost a dozen graduate students were preparing theses or dissertations about his work; this illustrates that some scholars took his writing seriously, against the prejudices. The thrust of Sigurdson’s paper is to show how Kerouac’s art and reception are more nuanced than previously understood.

The second presenter, David Stephen Calonne, will examine the work of one of the most prominent women of the Beat Generation, Diane di Prima (1934–2020), focusing on the influence of ancient Greek literature in her poems. A student of classical Greek as a young woman, di Prima’s enthusiasm showed in her recitations of passages from Homer’s Iliad in the original. Throughout her writing career, in her poetry and her 2001 memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Calonne will show, di Prima regularly makes allusions and references to Aeschylus, Herodotus, Homer, and other Greek authors and historical/mythological themes. Calonne will explore the ways that di Prima employs ancient sources as counterpoint to and commentary on contemporary life. Calonne will tie his presentation to recent developments in Beat Generation scholarship, such as the 2018 publication of Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition.

The third presenter, Marianna Hagler, will discuss contributions of the Beat Generation to the pedagogy of literature through the example of poet and critic Anne Waldman (1945–). At the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the capacious creative writing program at Naropa University in Colorado that she founded with Ginsberg in 1974, Waldman encouraged her students not to interpret Stein’s writing but to immerse themselves in what she calls its “mind grammar,” or the structure of consciousness rendered in poetic rhythm. The difference between these two ways of understanding poetry, Hagler will explain, matches William James’s two categories, descriptive and experiential knowledge, schemas Stein herself learned from James when she was his student at Harvard University. Hagler will argue that Waldman used Stein to engage in resistance to contemporary academic criticism and reform poetry pedagogy in the 1970s and 1980s. Hagler’s paper joins recent critical interest in the ambivalent relationship of professional literary criticism with lay reading habits in the twentieth century.

The presider will give one-minute introductions per presenter; each presenter will speak for seventeen minutes. The presider will then open the session to discussion with the audience. At recent MLA sessions on the Beat Generation, audiences have been numerous and energetic; the response to this panel will likely be as strong.