The Transnational Beat Generation in Austria (2)

The project examines connections between Austrian literature from circa 1960 to the present with the so called Beat Generation. This label was coined by a group of writers in the United States of America in the late 1940s, among them the poet Allen Ginsberg, the novelist Jack Kerouac, and the experimental writer William S. Burroughs. It has been considered as a solely US-American movement for decades. But in recent years a transnational turn in research on the Beat Generation emerged. The movement ceased to be regarded as a purely US-American phenomenon and is instead perceived as a global one by now even though the protagonists did not always know of each other and/or did not consider themselves as Beat writers. As a location for literature in the Beat context, Austria has not yet been researched in this respect. The project thus bridges a significant gap in several areas (transnational German/Austrian studies and American studies, Beat studies) and also integrates disciplines such as gender, theatre, and exile studies. The project will establish a catalogue of characteristics to define Beat criteria, based upon primary sources and academic research. It will then detect such criteria among the works and biographies of Austrian writers by examining intertextual references, appropriation of themes, forms, processes and modes of presentation as well as biographical points of contact. The corpus includes internationally renowned authors such as Elfriede Jelinek, Wolfgang Bauer and Peter Handke as well as representatives of the neo-avant-garde (e.g. Oswald Wiener, Gunter Falk), the main protagonists of the Vienna Schule für Dichtung and authors of a younger generation. Central to the project are also the life and work of the Austro-American Beat poet ruth weiss. The primary aim of the project is to continue the work carried out within the project Transnational Literature: Austria and the Beat Generation (20172021) and to present a comprehensive monograph, which on the one hand condenses the results of biographical and text-analytical research into case studies, and on the other hand provides a bibliography that spans several decades as an empirical basis of sources for various research questions, especially those concerning transfer mechanisms and transnational networks between US-American and Austrian literature since the late 1950s.

The project continued the work of the project "Transnational Literature: Austria and the Beat Generation" (P29348) and explored several aspects of a phenomenon previously mostly neglected by academia: First, it examined the connections between American Beat literature and progressive Austrian literature. This included, for example, reading experiences that left their mark on Beat literature, personal encounters, or visits to Austria (e.g., for readings, but also William S. Burroughs' studies in Vienna in 1936/37). Second, after compiling an appropriate list of criteria, Austrian literature from the late 1950s onwards was examined for traces of Beat aesthetics, including intertextual references, thematic appropriations, performance forms, and biographical points of contact. The corpus includes authors such as Elfriede Jelinek, Wolfgang Bauer, Ernst Jandl, Gerhard Roth, protagonists of later generations such as Lucas Cejpek, Christian Ide Hintze, Christian Loidl, Susanne Toth, and authors who only emerged after 2000, such as Ann Cotten, Natascha Gangl, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Judith Nika Pfeifer, and many others. Third, the reception of Beat literature in Austria from the late 1950s onwards has been examined up to the present day and processes of change in perception have been analyzed, whereby it is not only mediation activities that are significant here (from newspaper reviews, translations and events such as Ginsberg's tour through Austria in 1980, to the founding of institutions such as the School of Poetry and the "Salon" in Vienna's Praterstraße), but also the transformation of the cultural climate in Austria over the decades. Fourth, as a special case, the work of Beat poet ruth weiss (name always written in lower case), who fled Austria for the US in 1938, was examined in more detail and her biography was traced as a precedent for a post-national artist's life, for which the criteria for a "transnational" Beat movement drafted at the beginning of the preliminary project ultimately fall short. Finally, as an important contribution to basic research, an annotated bibliography was compiled that can serve as an empirical basis for future research on source development. Not only will all these points be summarized in a voluminous monograph, scheduled for publication in 2027, but some aspects have already been published in several books (including the essay collection ruth weiss: Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art, edited by Thomas Antonic and Estbaliz Encarnacin Pinedo, [2021], the essay collection Die Stimmen des Dichters: Christian Loidl intermedial, edited by Antonic and Helmut Neundlinger, [2025]), as well as several essays in academic journals, and several papers presented at international conferences. Last but not least, the work on ruth weiss led to the FWF research project "ruth weiss: Complete Works Critical Hybrid Edition," (PAT4936124) led by Antonic, which was launched in June 2025 at Danube University Krems.