Book Review: The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: From Self-Destruction to Self-Liberation by Tanguy Harma

Yıl 2023, Cilt: 17 Sayı: 1, 145 - 148, 30.06.2023

Gillian Alban

https://doi.org/10.47777/cankujhss.1317166

Öz

Tanguy Harma’s monograph entitled The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: From Self-Destruction to Self-Liberation, with its fascinating cover illustration by Vasil Stanev, “2 Sugar Skulls,” presents an in-depth study of the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as inheritors of the European Existentialist and the American Transcendentalist tradition. It elaborates these two writers’ struggle to achieve meaningful life in post-war America under hegemonic capitalism and consumerism, crushed beneath conformity and social control, as they struggle towards a more authentic self-expression and liberation beyond the restraints that curtail transcendence.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Tanguy Harma, The Paradox of Thanatos, Self-Destruction, Self-Liberation