| 释义 |
beat generation
[Etym. disputed; the evidence suggests that it is f. beat ppl. a. 1 b, perh. infl. by beat n.1 4, but the coiner of the expression, J. Kerouac (1922–69), connected beat with beatitude (see quot. 19581).]
An expression applied at first to a group of young people, predominantly writers, artists, and their adherents, in San Francisco, later to similar groups elsewhere, adopting unconventional dress, manners, habits, etc., as a means of self-expression and social protest.
1952J. C. Holmes in N.Y. Times 16 Nov., Mag. 10/2 It was the face of a Beat Generation... It was John Kerouac..who..several years ago..said ‘You know, this is really a beat generation’. The origins of the word beat are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than the feeling of weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind. 1955‘Jean-Louis’ [= J. Kerouac] in New World Writing 10 Jazz of the Beat Generation... Here we were dealing with the pit and prune juice of poor beat life itself and the pathos of people in the Godawful streets. 1958J. C. Holmes in Esquire Feb. 35/2 ‘The Beat Generation,’ he [sc. J. Kerouac] said, ‘is basically a religious generation.’ And later, in another interview, Kerouac amplified ‘..Beat means beatitude, not beat up.’ 1958Sunday Times 25 May 6/4 ‘Where go? What do? What for?..’ That is the cry and philosophy of the beat generation, if a philosophy can be distilled from bewilderment, aimlessness and apathy. 1958Observer 14 Sept. 4/5 The ‘beat generation’ is beginning to acquire the same kind of dubious place in American culture as the Young Angries in Britain. 1963New Statesman 8 Feb. 202/3 The Beat Generation have come and gone, making a lot of noise but little real impact.
Hence beat n.4, beatnik |ˈbiːtnɪk| [-nik arbitrarily after sputnik, infl. by Yiddish -nik], ˈbeatster2, one of the beat generation, one who leads a ‘beat’ life (cf. beat n.1 16, from which beat in the present sense cannot be entirely dissociated); beat attrib., or as adj., ˈbeatniky a., of, or characteristic of, the beat generation or of a beatnik; ˈbeatness, such a state.
1955[see above]. 1958Daily Express 23 July 4/2 This [sc. San Francisco] is the home and the haunt of America's Beat generation and these are the Beatniks—or new barbarians. 1958J. Kerouac On the Road ix. 87 The beat countermen and dishgirls who made no bones about their beatness. 1958New Statesman 6 Sept. 294/3 The ‘beats’ reached literary respectability in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. 1959Encounter June 42 Portrait of the Beatnik... The Beatnik in his bold rebellion against American Bourgeois Values. Ibid. July 56/2 ‘Beat Zen’ followers take dope or alcohol to reach a giggly state of ecstasy. 1959New Statesman 6 June 795/1 The post-Presley teenage beatsters. 1959Guardian 14 Oct. 7/3 He calls a flat a ‘pad’ (Beatnik language). 1964Listener 5 Nov. 709/1 Suddenly everybody was slightly beatniky. 1965Spectator 22 Jan. 98/2 One of the first changes he noticed was that the beats, instead of writing poems, were making films. 1966English Studies XLVII. 154 In the mid-twentieth century the typical Bohemian has become the beatnik poet or pseudo-philosopher. |