Wising Up the Marks

by Murphy, Timothy S.

• ISBN13: 9780520209510
• ISBN10: 0520209516
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

William S. Burroughs is one of the twentieth century's most visible, controversial, and baffling literary figures. In the first comprehensive study of the writer, Timothy S. Murphy places Burroughs in the company of the most significant intellectual minds of our time. In doing so, he gives us an immensely readable and convincing account of a man whose achievements continue to have a major influence on American art and culture. Murphy draws on the work of such philosophers as Gilles Deleuze, Feacute;lix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also investigates the historical contexts from which Burroughs's writings arose. From the paranoid isolationism of the Cold War through the countercultural activism of the sixties to the resurgence of corporate and state control in the eighties, Burroughs's novels, films, and music hold a mirror to the American psyche. Murphy coins the term "amodernism" as a way to describe Burroughs's contested relationship to the canon while acknowledging the writer's explicit desire for a destruction of such systems of classification. Despite the popular mythology that surrounds Burroughs, his work has been largely excluded from the academy of American letters. Finally here is a book that presents a solid portrait of a major artistic innovator, a writer who combines aesthetics and politics and who can perform as anthropologist, social goad, or media icon, all with consummate skill.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted"	p. 1
Invisibility and Amodernism	p. 16
No Final Glossary: Fugitive Words in Junky and Queer	p. 46
"All Agents defect and all Resisters sell out": The Negative Dialectics of Naked Lunch	p. 67
"I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the word forever": The Dialectic of Treason and the Abolition of the Law in the Nova Trilogy	p. 103
The Wild Boys: Desire, Fantasy, and the Book of the Dead	p. 142
Quien es? Reconstitution of the Revolutionary Subject in Burroughs's Late Trilogy	p. 169
Conclusion: Burroughs's Fin de siecle: Listen to My Last Words Everywhere	p. 201
Notes	p. 233
Works Cited	p. 256
Index	p. 267
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.