Davis Schneiderman & Philip Walsh 
Retaking the Universe [PDF ebook] 
William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization

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.

İçerik tablosu

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

Yazar hakkında

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.