William S. Burroughs is one of America’s most influential and widely studied writers. A leading member of the Beat movement, his books and essays continue to attract a wide readership. His films, paintings, recordings and other projects that grew out of his literary production, together with his iconic persona as a counter-culture (anti-)hero, mean his work has become a broad cultural phenomenon.
This collection of essays by leading scholars offers an interdisciplinary consideration of Burroughs’s art. It links his lived experience to his many major prose works written from 1953 on, as well his sound, cinema and media projects. Moving beyond the merely literary, the contributors argue for the continuing social and political relevance of Burroughs’s work for the emerging global order.
Themes include: Burroughs and contemporary theory; debates on ‘reality’; violence; magic and mysticism; cybernetic cultures; language and technology; control and transformation; transgression and addiction; the limits of prose; image politics and the avant-garde.
Tabella dei contenuti
Foreword: Jennie Skerl
Introduction: Millions of People Reading the Same Words – Davis Schneiderman
and Philip Walsh
PART I: Theoretical Depositions
1. Shift Coordinate Points: William S. Burroughs and Contemporary Theory –
Allen Hibbard
2. Exposing the Reality Film: William S. Burroughs Among the Situationists –
Timothy S. Murphy
3. Reactivating the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Burroughs as Critical
Theorist – Philip Walsh
4. Speculating Freedom: Addiction, Control, and Rescriptive Subjectivity in
the Work of William S. Burroughs – Jason Morelyle
5. Excursus on Burroughs, Dada and Surrealism – Jon Longhi
PART II: Writing, Sign, Instrument: Language and Technology
6. Burroughs’s Writing Machines – Anthony Enns
7. Totally Wired: Prepare Your Affidavits of Explanation – Edward Desautels
8. New World Ordure: Burroughs, Globalization and the Grotesque – Dennis
Mc Daniel
9. Nothing Hear Now but the Recordings: Burroughs’s ‘Double Resonance’ –
Davis Schneiderman
10. Guerrilla Conditions: Burroughs, Gysin and Balch Go To The Movies –
Jamie Russell
11. Cutting Up Politics – Oliver Harris
PART III: Alternatives: Realities and Resistances
12. The Map and the Machine, reprint from The Garden and the Map (1973) –
John Vernon
13. The High Priest and The Great Beast at the Place of Dead Roads – Ron
Roberts
14. A Camera on Violence: Reality and Fiction in Blade Runner: A Movie –
Roberta Fornari
15. William S. Burroughs: Laughter and Avant-Garde Strategies – Katherine
Streip
16. Lemurian Time War – Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
Index
Circa l’autore
Philip Walsh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. He is author of Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory.
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