The Beat Generation

First off, I just noticed the new name of the blog. I love it. Alright, here we go.

Topic - On The Road in context: The Beat Generation and its significance

I. The Beat Generation

• Introduce the Beats and give some background
• Get into the significance of the movement and some of the people who represent it, and more importantly the ideology
• I'm basically trying to give a crash-course definition of the movement in this section
• End it with certain emphasis on Kerouac

II.The book as a representation of the Beat generation

• Who the characters are and what the story is
• Mechanic as metaphor: the whole point is that nothing happens
• How this book would be read in the 50's
• This section will be clearly connected to the previous

III. The Hippies

• Go into the whole idea of this being the direct aftermath
• Link this movement to the Beats
• This is basically a continuation of the history-related concepts presented earlier in the paper

IV. The modern impact

• I want to prove that there are various aspects of the Beats in the Millennial generation
• I plan to connect certain ideas of that counter culture to modern keyboard activism
• I should probably link the Beats to the modern hipsters but I'm not sure if I'll do that because it seems kind of insubstantial
• I also plan to talk about ways in which the Beats influenced modern politics
• taxes are no longer patriotic (I understand the credit given to Vietnam but without a movement of people questioning authority like that the effect wouldn't be there)
• Individual vs collective in terms of fairness (I don't credit these ideas to the Beats but they definitely brought that stuff to the table)