In conjunction with the Yale Alumni College and Vanderbilt University’s W.T. Bandy Center, the Amherst College French Department is hosting a lecture to explore the influence of French modernism on the Beat generation. Robert Barsky, Professor of Humanities and Law at Vanderbilt, and Jonathan Shaw, Vanderbilt’s Head of Libraries, will lead the Yale Alumni College course. A unique opportunity to discover French and Beat archival documents from Vanderbilt's collections. Open House 3-4 PM, Lecture 4-5:30 PM. Open to all. Refreshments provided.
In the years following WWII, an eclectic group of writers and artists gathered together in a variety of settings and forged a major subculture movement deemed “Beat”. Sexually liberated (mostly) and inspired by copious amounts of intoxicating substances and approaches, they rejected prevailing American norms, and embarked upon spiritual and creative quests that drew from English Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, Black
culture, Buddhism, Taoism, psychoanalysis and French modernism. In the fall of 2025, Professor Robert Barsky (Vanderbilt University) taught a Yale Alumni Course that focused on Beat Writers’ connection to French literary traditions. His argument was that many of the Beats adapted, (mis)-interpreted and mis-translated ideas from French Modernist writers to America. A particularly salient moment in this story occurs in 1957 when court cases involving Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Burroughs, coupled with the “on the road” wanderlust, inspired Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky to travel to Paris, followed by William S. Burroughs, Derek Raymond, and Harold Norse. They took up residence in a run-down bohemian hotel on rue Git-le-Coeur, which was thereby transformed into an epicenter for new creative work. Residents of the hotel spent their days reading, discussing, and creating works that were shaped and inspired by the writings and attitudes of, for example, Guillaume Apollinaire; Charles Baudelaire; Stéphane Mallarmé; Arthur Rimbaud; Tristan Tzara; André Breton; Jean Genet; Blaise Cendrars; Antonin Artaud; Henri Michaux; Louis-Ferdinand Céline; Marcel Proust; and others.
