Minor Beat Affects
Open AccessHinging on Deleuze’s notion of “minor literature”, this dissertation locates a series of minoritized writers in the Beat Generation literary movement who came from oppositional embodied positions and historicizes their sensory experiences as those sensory experiences were present in their poetry, fiction and autobiographies. Each chapter of Minor Beat Affects looks at the Minor and Major Beats as they tackle a different literary form and left their sensory memories as well as the proof of their location in marginality. While the introduction helps to explain what these memories from marginal members of the Beat generation or Minor Beat Affects are, the rest of the chapters look at specific instances of such material sensory-emotional memories as they are present in different forms of 20th century and contemporary literature and media. The first chapter, Transfeminine Ghosts locates the literature of the Minor Beats as tackling the visuality of trans people during the mid twentieth century and the ghostliness of these fictional portrayals in relation to the history of trans erasure within the Nazi take-over of modernity. The second chapter, Media Burnout Poetics thinks about how the Minor Beats related to the increasingly expanding media and information industries in the late twentieth century and to a mass media experience of burnout. The third chapter Rhythm of the Beats thinks about how the minor and major beats charted their rhythms of motion in their autobiographies. Finally, the Epilogue looks at The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis’ pop culture portrayal of the Beat generation and how that portrayal of the Beats through the trope of the degenerate youth epitomizes the marginality of several oppressed groups in its multiple pathologizations within normative commentaries. These chapters together help to portray the underside and counter-memories of the minority members of the Beat generation that have been neglected by traditional literary analyses.
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