Lardas at UCSB

John Lardas
"The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs"

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Wednesday, January 24 / 4 P.M. / FREE
McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building

John Lardas will discuss and sign copies of his new book, "The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs" (University of Illinois Press, December, 2000), at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, January 24 in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Builidng, UCSB.

Blending biography, cultural history, and literary criticism, "The Bop Apocalypse" explores the religious concerns, metaphysical realities, and spiritual pursuits that undergirded the early friendship and literary collaborations among Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Williams S. Burroughs.

Presenting a religious biography of the Beats from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, John Lardas examines how Beat writers distilled a theology of experience--a religious vision that animated their everyday lives and art--from a flurry of disparate influences that included the saxophone wails of Charlie Parker, the psychology of William Reich, the hipster dialects of New York City, and especially the prophecies of Oswald Spengler.

Revisiting the content of major works the Beats produced during the 1950s, Lardas considers how lived religion was incorporated into the way they wrote and demonstrates how they engaged America on moral grounds through the discourse of public religion.

"A brilliant exposition of the visionary ambitions animating the Beats, The Bop Apocalypse is written with depth and a genuine understanding of historical dynamics . . . . [Lardas] has written an essential book." -John Tytell, author of Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation

"An indispensable study that explains the religious/philosophical underpinnings of the counterculture. It is impossible fully to understand the Beat Generation without reading John Lardas's enlightened work." -Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center, University of New Orleans

John Lardas, currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Barbara, holds degrees in religion from Princeton University and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.