The chapter: “Reaching Towards the Light: Transitory Spaces and the Negated Material Body in Selected Texts by Ruth Weiss”, essentially proposes that Weiss dealt with ecological subjects through complex textual strategies, and she remains a transnational cross-century Beat wanderer.
Ruth Weiss, born in Berlin in 1928 to Austrian-Jewish parents, arrived in San Francisco in 1952 after hitchhiking through the United States. Crowned years later as the “Goddess of the Beat Generation” by San Francisco Chronicle critic Herb Caen, Weiss has worked for almost seven decades with a plurality of artistic forms. Offering diverse and comprehensive points of entrance into Weiss’s oeuvre, the essays in this volume adopt a multidisciplinary approach that attests to the cross-pollination between art forms in postwar counterculture. In addition, the volume also includes shorter, non-academic contributions and previously unpublished archival material. Bringing together scholars, academics and artists from around the world, this volume represents a timely and much-needed response to the increasing interest in Weiss’s work in the last decades.