“Countercultural Trends” Worksheet
Read the following passages from "Countercultural Trends," and contextualize, paraphrase,
elaborate upon, and relate their ideas to other course texts. Answer the questions which follow
and formulate at least one additional line of inquiry.
"Setting out to break all the taboos of conventional morality and cultural consensus, the Beats
and their renegade friends openly declared their disdain for established norms and values. For
them . . . art meant action" (88).
●
What are some examples of "taboos of conventional morality and cultural
consensus"?
●
Whom or what do they serve and/or oppress?
"They preached love and were open to sexual adventure, regardless of their partners' gender. In
their journeys toward the inner world, they predicted New Age dreams of self-realization" (88).
●
What is "the inner world" and what does a journey there entail? What is escaped, lost
or gained on this journey?
●
What is "self-realization," and what are some of its goals, drawbacks, aims and
obstacles?
"It was for people who were making things with the detritus of society, who themselves were
ostracized or alienated from full involvement in society" (89).
●
What is "detritus" and what does it mean to make art from it?
●
How does this art-medium of detritus reflect or address being "ostracized or alienated
from full involvement in society"?
"[E]verything that industrial society would prefer to forget and ignore and neglect takes on a
pitiless Frankenstein vitality. It isn’t beautiful, it isn’t nice, it isn’t spiritually elevating. It casts
the darkest kind of suspicion on the lives we lead and the twisted ingenuity that supports these
lives. And offers us no answers at all" (113).
●
How and why does this view of art distinguish itself from conventional expectations
of beauty and comfort in art?
●
What is the "twisted ingenuity that supports" the suspicious "lives we lead," and why
are answers withheld?
"Graffiti is an expression of the disenfranchised, who mark and claim their territory with their
'tags' (names) and various signs and symbols, often understood solely by initiates" (116).
●
Who are "the disenfranchised," why would territory need to be claimed?
●
What motivates covert and exclusive communication "understood solely by
initiates"?
"The counterculture . . . was directed against established authority. Dissenters all, they
challenged the 'American way of life' and its economic foundation" (118).
●
What is-- and is worth attacking about-- "established authority"?
●
What's wrong with the "economic foundation" of the "American way of life"?
