I think there's an interesting question here - I've been pondering some of these issues myself - but IMO right now this is a bit broad. Can you focus it a bit on particular aspects of how beat literature is studied in academia?

@Thanks. What do you mean by “how it is studied”?

I don't know - that's kind of the problem with your question. I don't know what it is you want to uncover here?

I mean (1) how experts and professors of, say, English literature, or European comparative literature, who also, by means of general culture, personal culture, or particular expertise, consider this literary movement (2) with time passing and many journalistic and academic investigation of this literature, what is currently the view on its quality and its legacy’s importance

It is not rare that in papers introduction or in encyclopedic articles concerning one literary movement, it is recalled what it the general view held on the legacy and quality of a movement

What is the quality and the legacy of the beat generation with regard to the history of Western literature? It is for instance no doubt that French realism or German romanticism are considered major literary movements with regard to both their influence and their quality

Maybe French realism is considered relatively less important with regard to German romanticism, btw

Well for me your (1) and (2) are too broad. But hey, it's got an upvote, so what do I know?

@MattThrower haha, we’ll see. I will reflect on it and think if I can make it clearer

I hope you can. It's struck me that there's definitely a disconnect in the way the beats are treated as a conscious literary movement when compared to both the size and rigour of the modernist and postmodernist movements that bookend them. I suspect it's because they had an outsized impact on the popular cultural landscape of the US.

“ It's struck me that there's definitely a disconnect in the way the beats are treated as a conscious literary movement when compared to both the size and rigour of the modernist and postmodernist movements that bookend them.” I am not sure what you mean by disconnect, but my feeling is that the beat generation is not treated as a very legitimate artistic movement.

To take a comparable example, the European seems to me to be taken much more seriously. It is taught in French junior high and high school for instance

@Starckman Interesting. It seems almost the opposite to me - that they're overly legitimised. That's what I meant by the disconnect. Beat literature consisted of a handful of writers who produced perhaps three great works, and they had no coherent motives or goals until Ginsberg wrote some down in the 80s well after the movement was spent intellectually. Constrast it with modernism which had self-concious goals from the outset and encompassed dozens of writers.

I don't mean to diminish the values of the individual works of beat writers by saying this - only that in sense of an artistic movement it seems to have gained an intellectual regard beyond that which you might expect from the size and quality of its body of work. As I said before I think it's because that small corpus had a very large impact on American culture in the 50s and 60s.

Beat writers are certainly treated as a legitimate artistic movement in America but perhaps less so in Europe (I'm British FWIW)

@MattThrower I also fully agree their success is due to the latter political movement, and not by the quality of their work

I recall Kerouac’s book encountered success not until the beginning of the hippie movement

That is, ten years after their publication

@MattThrower Would you say the same about Charles Bukowski?

@Starckman well I would, yes, but then again I personally think Bukowski was a talentless hack :)

@Starckman The answers you are looking for may be in The Beats: A Very Short Introduction and The Cambridge Companion to the Beats.