Researcher:
Mortenson, Erik

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Faculty Member

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Erik

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Mortenson

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Mortenson, Erik

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2011 - 201812

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Researcher Of Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.0c050abd-4e8e-40a7-af81-59256c022899

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
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    Capturing the beat moment: cultural politics and the poetics of presence
    (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A
    Capturing the Beat Moment examines the assumptions the Beats made about the moment and their attempt to "capture" this "immediacy," focusing on the works of Kerouac and Ginsberg as well as on those of women and African American Beat writers.
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    High off the page: representing the drug experience in the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
    (The University Press of Kentucky, 2012) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A
    his article explores attempts by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to transcribe their drug experiences onto the written page. Utilizing both Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on intersubjective communication and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of the “Body Without Organs,” it argues that by writing “through the body,” Kerouac and Ginsberg are able to transmit the physical and emotional effects of the drug experience to the reader via the medium of the text. he reader thus receives not just an objective account of the drug experience, but becomes privy to the alterations in temporal percep- tion and intersubjective empathy that drug use inaugurates.
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    The 'underground' reception of the beats in Turkey
    (Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2013) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A
    This article examines how Beat texts are received in Turkey as underground literature and what that reception reveals not only about the possibilities for cultural dissent in Turkey, but the extent to which the Beats are still capable of promoting social change in general. While translations of Beat Generation texts are a fairly recent phenomenon in Turkey, the internet has provided them with additional exposure, with the result that Beat texts play a role in discussions of the growing genre of underground literature in Turkey. This study analyses that role in order to discuss questions of commodification, transgression, censorship, and cultural difference that impact Beat texts in Turkey. Beat writers offer a form of resistance that allows Turkish readers to challenge mainstream values and mount legal challenges through the classic figure of the Beat rebel. This unique situation provides insight not only into the possibilities in culturally translating an imported counterculture, but also provides a refracted view of the assumptions operating in that countercultural model as it is redeployed in a different nation at a different moment of history.
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    Ambiguous borderlands: shadow imagery in cold war American culture
    (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A
    The image of the shadow in mid-twentieth-century America appeared across a variety of genres and media including poetry, pulp fiction, photography, and film. Drawing on an extensive framework that ranges from Cold War cultural histories to theorizations of psychoanalysis and the Gothic, Erik Mortenson argues that shadow imagery in 1950s and 1960s American culture not only reflected the anxiety and ambiguity of the times but also offered an imaginative space for artists to challenge the binary rhetoric associated with the Cold War. After contextualizing the postwar use of shadow imagery in the wake of the atomic bomb, Ambiguous Borderlands looks at shadows in print works, detailing the reemergence of the pulp fiction crime fighter "the Shadow" in the late-1950s writings of Sylvia Plath, Amiri Baraka, and Jack Kerouac. Using Freudian and Jungian conceptions of the unconscious, Mortenson then discusses Kerouac’s and Allen Ginsberg’s shared dream of a "shrouded stranger" and how this dream shaped their Beat aesthetic. Turning to the visual, Mortenson examines the dehumanizing effect of shadow imagery in the Cold War photography of Robert Frank, William Klein, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Mortenson concludes with an investigation of the use of chiaroscuro in 1950s film noir and the popular television series The Twilight Zone, further detailing how the complexities of Cold War society were mirrored across these media in the ubiquitous imagery of light and dark. From comics to movies, Beats to bombs, Ambiguous Borderlands provides a novel understanding of the Cold War cultural context through its analysis of the image of the shadow in midcentury media. Its interdisciplinary approach, ambitious subject matter, and diverse theoretical framing make it essential reading for anyone interested in American literary and popular culture during the mid-twentieth century.
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    Beat Turkey: a belated influence
    (Routledge, 2018) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A
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    Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: the letters
    (Univ Houston, Victoria-Art & Sci, 2013) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A
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    Poetry takes centre stage: John Wieners' Still Life at the New York Poets Theatre
    (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A
     Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays—and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre—shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the “Afro-Beats” - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima, Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself.
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    Diagnosing the national neurosis: The underground journal sizofrengi and ıts critique of 1990s Turkish society
    (Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2015) N/A; Department of Comparative Literature; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Karaoğlu, Rafet; Faculty Member; Undergraduate Student; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A; N/A
    This paper examines the attempt by the Turkish underground journal Sizofrengi (1992-98) to provide a space for psychiatrists, artists, and mental patients to voice their personal concerns as a means to critique problems in Turkish society. Sizofrengi was founded by young psychiatrists in order to critique the problems they felt were endemic to their field. Rejecting the institutional practices and assumptions the editors found constraining in their psychiatric community, Sizofrengi sought to give the patient a space to speak for themselves in order to deconstruct the vaunted role of the psychiatrist in Turkey. But Sizofrengi also sought to appropriate the language of psychology and the "madnesses" of the patients it strives to cure in order to revitalize what the editors felt was a moribund literary culture. The journal gave a voice to marginalized, underground writers, critics, and film makers that would go on to become far better known outside the confines of the journals' pages. While the result demonstrates that care must be taken when borrowing the discourse of the mentally ill, Sizofrengi presents an interesting case of a journal that was able to draw on issues of psychiatry in order to critique both literary and mainstream society.
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    The ghost of humanism: rethinking the subjective turn in postwar American photography
    (Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2014) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A
    This article examines the use of shadow, blur, graininess, and reflection in the work of the postwar photographers Robert Frank, William Klein, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard as a response to the rhetoric of Cold War containment. In contrast to the more comforting images in Edward Steichen's popular exhibit The Family of Man, which sought to downplay Cold War anxieties, the photographs of Frank, Klein, and Meatyard challenged viewer expectation by presenting human figures in varying states of disintegration and disappearance. The term 'subjective' has long been used to describe a return to personal and private concerns during the postwar years, but discussion has focused mainly on the subjectivity of the artist rather than the viewer. By challenging the sanctity of the human figure, Frank, Klein, and Meatyard force viewers to confront such difficult images and, in the process, re-examine the fears and anxieties that lay dormant during the tense years of the early Cold War.
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    Underground literature and its influence on youth in Turkey
    (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2015) Ergun, Duygu; Erdoğan, Selen; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A
    This paper examines the impact underground literature (yeralti edebiyati) has on influencing the opinions and beliefs of Turkey's youth regarding issues of contemporary importance. In order to understand the relevance of this genre to Turkish youth culture, we have not only examined the debate surrounding the topic in popular and academic circles, but also asked the readers themselves their opinions about their experience with the genre (in both its imported Western and homegrown Turkish variants) and its relevance to their lives. For our purposes, the effect of such texts on readers is the primary focus, and ours is the first mixed-media study to conduct a methodological, data-based investigation into the composition and opinions of underground literature's readers. Thus, our study supplements a lack in the existing scholarship by offering concrete qualitative and quantitative data that will better elucidate our knowledge of the relationship between underground literature and Turkish youth attitudes, as well as the potential the genre might hold for the future of Turkey's youth.