The Beginning and the Narration of Ivan Slamnig’s Novel Bolja polovica hrabrosti

The study discusses Ivan Slamnig’s novel entitled Bolja polovica hrabrosti with focusing on the narrative features of the beginning of the novel. Using the results of the Croatian literary studies, the paper places the novel in the context of Croatian prose as the first postmodern Croatian novel and an outstanding example of Beat literature in Croatia and Yugoslavia, which Aleksandar Flaker called jeans prose.The paper compares the narrative features and metapoetic meanings of the beginning of the novel with the narration of the whole novel and its closure. It establishes that the beginning of the novel gives a dominant role to eventuality, coincidence, and meaninglessness instead of causally motivated storytelling. The beginning of the novel does not make sense at the level of the story told in the whole novel, however, it is important at the metalevel of narration and in its possible readings.The main character of the novel called Flaks lands without a known aim aft er escaping from somewhere. At the end of the novel, he escapes again from the story prescribed for him. The “story within a story” structure has an important role in the novel. The novel thus has two narrators and two narrated stories. According to Genette’s classification, the narrator of the whole novel (Flaks) is an extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator of his own story. The other narrator (Aunt Matilda) is a character in Flaks’s story and fictive author of the embedded story with its own heterodiegetic narrator. Flaks is an implied reader of Matilda’s short story. The two narratives are in a metadialogue wiTheach other. Flaks has no organized life and no organized story. Matilda’s life is well organized, and her written short story is well organized, too. Matilda tries to make sense to the random happenings of Flaks’s life in her own story. With the story she tells, she tries to bring both her own and Flaks’s life story to a meaningful end.The beginning of the novel is associated with the characteristics of the Yugoslavian version of Beat literature, the jeans prose: generational confrontation and the denial of conformism to the post-war Yugoslavian establishment. The protagonist’s drift ing without any plan, which is typical for the genre, is taken by Slamnig as a basis so that he can direct our attention to the activity of the implied author and to the fact that the events portrayed in the novel and also the implied author are constructed. This is reinforced by the “story within a story” structure. The novel shows that the beginning and the ending of the events in the narration is arbitrary, and the meaning of the story depends on the selection of the starting point and the end point.

The Beats

This volume is the first-ever collection devoted to teaching Beat literature in high school to graduate-level classes. Essays address teaching topics such as the history of the censorship of Beat writing, Beat spirituality, the small press revolution, Beat composition techniques and ELL, Beat multiculturalism/globalism and its legacies, techno-poetics, the road tale, Beat drug use, the Italian-American Beat heritage, Beats and the visual arts of the 1960s, the Beat and Black Mountain confluence, Beat comedy, Beat performance poetry, Beat creative non-fiction, West coast-East/coast Beat communities, and Beat representations of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. Individual essays focus on Gary Snyder’s ecopoetics, William S. Burroughs’s post- and transhumanism, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (teaching it in the U.S. and abroad) and his Quebecois novels, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman. Many additional Beat-associated writers, such as Amiri Baraka Gregory Corso, are featured in the other essays. The collection opens with a comprehensive essay by Nancy M. Grace on a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, and contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts. Many of the essays highlight online resources and other materials proven useful in the classroom. Critical methods range from feminism/gender theory, to critical race theory, formalism, historiography, religious studies, and transnational theory to reception theory. The volume concludes with selected scholarly resources, both primary and secondary, including films, music, and other art forms; and a set of Beat-related classroom assignments recommended by active Beat scholars and teachers.

Humanism, Posthumanism, Transhumanism

This essay captures more contemporary philosophical perspectives on Beat literature, specifically William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, through the application of humanist, posthumanist, and transhumanist philosophies. The essay also includes a detailed list of key philosophical resources for teaching this approach.

Home and Abroad

This essay presents a comprehensive overview of the many ways in which Beat literature represent Beat concerns with international culture and politics as well as multicultural concerns in the Unites States and abroad.

Back to the Future

This comprehensive essay presents a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, suggestions for contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts, and an outline of the contents of the volume.

Spirituality and Religious Traditions in Beat Literature

This essay explicates a Beat fascination with esoteric religious traditions, including astrology, alchemy, and Gnosticism, illuminating heterodoxies characterizing countercultural minorities from antiquity to the present and shaping the Beat imagination. Calonne presents detailed readings of the poetry of Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, and Michael McClure

Beat Performance Poetry

The essay investigates the influence of Beat performance poetry on the contemporary slam poetry movement, which includes many participants who openly acknowledge Beat antecedents for the social justice content of their poetry. The essay focuses on the Beat performance poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman, and discusses at length the ways in which the author teaches Beat literature as well as performance poetry.

Teaching Beat Little Magazines

The essay highlights the central role of little magazines, self-publishing, and the mimeograph revolution in the dissemination of Beat literature, Belletto provides guidance regarding how to select little magazines for classroom use to teach a Beat ethos and Beat canonicity

On the Road

Chapter One explores Robert Crumb’s discovery of Beat literature and the ways the emerging American counterculture became a primary influence on his own artistic and intellectual development. Crumb’s friend Marty Pahls was significant in turning Crumb on to the Beat writers. Crumb created portraits of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac. Crumb also became fascinated by Buddhism and Hinduism. The Beats’ spiritual quest reflected Crumb’s own desire to find alternatives to Western monotheistic religion. His character Mr. Natural bears several similarities to a Zen teacher, and Zen Buddhist themes will reappear throughout Crumb’s career, for example in his The Zen Teachings of Huang Po. The chapter concludes with a discussion of another author Crumb also greatly admired who is sometimes associated with the Beat movement, Charles Bukowski. Crumb contributed his drawings to several Bukowski books, bringing out themes of alienation which Crumb experienced frequently in his own life.