Guys Like Us

Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics

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by Michael Davidson

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published November 2003, 312 pages, paper

ISBN 0226137406

"It'll be guys like us that can start the thing." Or so wrote Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums. "Think of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country and hitch-hiking and bringing the world down to everybody."

This passage captures the way in which Kerouac's generation associated its utopian hopes and literary aspirations with the idea of a community of men. Guys Like Us considers how writers of the 1950s and 1960s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort. Michael Davidson considers a wide range of postwar literature, from the fiction of Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. He also considers the connection between masculinity and sexuality in films such as Chinatown and The Lady from Shanghai, as well as television shows, plays, and magazines from the period.

What results is a work that places poetic and artistic innovations beneath the lens of gender and the history of postwar America. 

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Compulsory Homosociality: Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, and the Gender of Poetics
2 From Margin to Mainstream: Postwar Poetry and the Politics of Containment
3 The Lady from Shanghai: California Orientalism and "Guys Like Us"
4 "When the world strips down and rouges up": Redressing Whitman
5 The Changing Name: Writing Gender in the Black Arts Nation Script
6 Definitive Haircuts: Female Masculinity in Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath
7 Hunting among Stones: Poetry, Pedagogy, and the Pacific Rim
Afterword: Moving Borders
Notes
List of Works Cited
Index