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.