The Post-Structuralist Repositioning of Allen Ginsberg’s Controversial Poem “Howl”: A Deconstructive Approach

Allen Ginsberg’s poems with their paradoxical language and syntax are a literary commentary on anger, hopelessness and frustration of the American society in the 1950s. His poems work on the binary concept of this culture versus counter-culture and try to portray a suitable diatribe on the cultural issues which were disgusting in Ginsberg’s mind. The present study looks for potentially malfunctioning sections of the language of his masterpiece “Howl” in order to argue that although attempted by the poet, there might be no organic unified without showing susceptibility to breakage and rupture. The study concludes that Ginsberg’s poetry strives hard to express a vehement lamentation in breath-length stanzas which often times decenters its own text and might raise multiple interpretations and provoke multiple lingual disorganizations. KEYWORDS: Allen Ginsberg, Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, poem, binary opposition, rupture, analysis