The 60s Counterculture - Debates, Literary Influences, and Intellectual Dimensions

The 60s Counterculture

&nbsp;&nbsp;Courses with "culture" in the titles are now ubiquitous in English Language and Literature departments in Korean universities today. This paper begins from an effort to make culture courses in literature departments more relevant to literature majors. I explore the possibilities of teaching a period in twentieth century US history that has received much popular and critical attention; the 1960s, and the "counterculture" that has become a staple of the decade.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;I begin with an examination of the primary debates revolving around the 60s counterculture: its definition, its relationship to mass culture, its connection to protest movements, and its continuities with and departures from the New Left. I then proceed to examine the Beat movement of the 1950s to explore the nature of Beat sensibilities that become constitutive of 60s counterculture. My interest in the Beats is part of an attempt to pursue an area that has received scant attention in critical studies on the 60s counterculture. While the Beats are often cited as the pioneers of the 60s counterculture, their precise connection to the counterculture that followed is not clearly established. The Beat movement was foremost an artistic movement that reflected the individual, personal rebellion of the Beat writers. I thus consider how in radically redefining the nature of aesthetic work, the Beats were able to subvert conventional understandings of intellectual activity and the role of intellectuals in society. My reading of the Beats and their influences on the 60s counterculture is supplemented by an examination of a novel by one of the foremost of the Beat writers, Jack Kerouac&quot;s On the Road (1957). Kerouac&quot;s novel, generally viewed as having chronicled the Beat lifestyle, is said to have been enormously popular in the 60s. In looking at a popular countercultural text of the 60s, and the specific features of resistance at work in the novel, I try to consider the particular manifestations of the 60s counterculture that are prefigured in a Beat novel, one remembered as having been tremendously inspiring to the readers in the 60s.