Naked Dinner: a Comparison of Dionysian and Apollonian Values Between the Beat Generation and Generation Z
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Everything Lost
Everything Lost Everything LosT THE LATIN AMERICAN NOTEBOOK OF WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS GENERAL EDITORS Geoffrey D. Smith and John M. Bennett VOLUME EDITOR Oliver Harris THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS / COLUMBUS Copyright © 2008 by the Estate of William S. Burroughs. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burroughs, William S., 1914–1997. Everything lost : the Latin American notebook of William S. Burroughs / general editors: Geoffrey D. Smith and John M. Bennett ; introduction by Oliver Harris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1080-2 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1080-5 (alk. paper) 1. Burroughs, William S., 1914–1997—Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc. 2. Burroughs, William S., 1914–1997— Travel—Latin America. I. Smith, Geoffrey D. (Geoffrey Dayton), 1948– II. Bennett, John M. III. Title. PS3552.U75E63 2008 813’.54—dc22 2007025199 Cover design by Fulcrum Design Corps, Inc . Type set in Adobe Rotis. Text design and typesetting by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe. Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanance of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.49-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 coNtents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION BY OLIVER HARRIS ix COMMENTS ON THE TEXT BY GEOFFREY D. SMITH xxvii NOTEBOOK FACSIMILE 1 TRANSCRIPT AND FAIR COPY (with notes and variant readings) 105 ABOUT THE EDITORS 217 acknoWledgments First and foremost, the editors wish to thank James Grauerholz, literary execu- tor of the William S. Burroughs estate, for permission to publish this seminal holograph notebook. -
The Dark Ecology of Naked Lunch
humanities Article The Dark Ecology of Naked Lunch George Hart Department of English, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840, USA; [email protected] Received: 15 September 2020; Accepted: 22 October 2020; Published: 30 October 2020 Abstract: In this article, I argue that William S. Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch engages in a “perverse aesthetics” that is analogous to Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology. The novel’s main themes of consumption and control are directly related to the Anthropocene’s twin disasters of global warming and mass extinction, and the trope for addiction, junk, reveals Burroughs’ deep analysis of the political and social forces that attempt to control life, what Burroughs calls biocontrol. By placing the novel’s obsession with hanging/lynching in the context of dark ecology, its critique of racism can also be seen as a critique of speciesism. Keywords: William S. Burroughs; Naked Lunch; dark ecology; consumption; control; Timothy Morton; speciesism; consumerism; mass extinction In the introduction of The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind, Chad Weidner rejects Timothy Morton’s dark ecology as a model for reading Naked Lunch. Drawing from The Ecological Thought, Weidner dismisses Morton’s claims that thinking ecologically is viral (an idea that would seem to appeal to the author of Naked Lunch), and that ecology includes such things as human emotions, mental illness, and capitalism, because such a theory “cast[s] a very wide net indeed”. According to Weidner, Morton “seems to accept the notion of nature as a cultural construct ::: but at the same time advises that we abandon romantic notions of nature altogether, to develop a more skeptical postmodern position. -
How Queer Is Queer? Burroughs’ Novella Through Rose-Tinted Glasses
97 CLINA Vol. 3-1, 97-115 June 2017 eISSN: 2444-1961 DOI: https://doi.org/10.14201/clina20173197115 How Queer is Queer? Burroughs’ Novella through Rose-Tinted Glasses ¿Queer es queer? La novela corta de Burroughs leída con gafas de colo de rosa Guillermo BADENES Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina [email protected] Recibido: 16-6-2016. Revisado: 29-9-2016. Aceptado: 2-3-2017. Abstract: Using tools from Cultural Studies, Linguistics and Translation Studies, and following Keith Harvey´s (2000) methodology in the analysis of gay camp in translation, this paper studies William Burroughs’ novella Queer (written in 1953, published in 1985, and translated into Spanish in 2013). Considering the historical differences in 1953, 1985 and 2013 to frame the context of production, the article ponders on the two literary systems which the work entered to discuss its reception. Additionally, while at times Burroughs’ novella steps away from traditional «gay slang» (Penelope and Wolfe 1979), which Burroughs reportedly despised, some other times it sinks deep into «camp»: In Marcial Souto’s translation, «butch» and «camp» blend while some of the sexual power of the source is lost in translation. Tapping into Souto’s translation, we may see how far (or near) queer studies and queer translation have gone in the last sixty years. Keywords: Camp; Queer Translation; Cultural Studies; Cultural Margins; Otherness. Resumen: Utilizando las herramientas de Estudios Culturales, Lingüística y Traductología, y siguiendo la metodología propuesta por Keith Harvey (2000) en el CLINA Guillermo BADENES vol. 3-1, June 2017, 97-115 How Queer is Queer? Burroughs’ eISSN: 2444-1961 Novella through Rose-Tinted Glasses © Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca - CC BY-NC-ND 97 análisis del estilo camp gay y su traducción, este trabajo estudia la novela corta Queer, de William Burroughs (escrita en 1953, publicada en 1985 y traducida al castellano en 2013). -
The Beat Generation's Impact on Neal Cassady
HON 495 English Independent Study with Dr. Joan Dean Beat to Death: The Beat Generation’s Impact on Neal Cassady The Beat Generation is one of the most influential movements in American literature. The lives of these writers are just as fascinating as their stories and poetry. The most important members and contributors were writer Jack Kerouac, poet Allen Ginsberg, and their best friend, lover, and muse Neal Cassady. These three men, as well as others along the way, would redefine the roles of men in a post-World War II America as well as create a new image for the country. Arguably, it was Cassady who was the catalyst for this movement, but he hardly wrote a word. He came to New York from Denver, where his past was fabricated and unbelievable, to have Kerouac teach him how to write. Cassady, the conman, wanted to learn from Kerouac and then from Ginsberg. He was immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as Dean Moriarty, the rebel from Denver, who always chose adventure over responsibility. Allen Ginsberg wrote him as a “secret hero” in his most famous poem “Howl” (Ginsberg 136). Both Kerouac and Ginsberg idolized Cassady but for different reasons. Cassady himself is an enigma, his entire life story a fabrication. He grew up on the streets of Denver, stealing cars and hustling. He was also an altar boy and a father of three, and even tried his hand at writing with his unfinished autobiography The First Third. With the help of Kerouac, he managed to make his life into what would later be the embodiment of the Beat Generation. -
“Being the Beats: How Did the Beat Generation Shape Ideas of Gender in 1950S America?”
Page | 59 “Being the Beats: How did the Beat Generation shape ideas of gender in 1950s America?” LIANNE TAN MHIS 365 From the Beats to Big Brother Introduction From the 1950s through to the 1960s, magazines, newspapers and TV shows bombarded Americans with images of the Beat Generation.1 SimuLtaneousLy Loved and hated, the Beats was a key group that emerged in response to the suburban consumerist cuLture of 1950s America and who estabLished their identity through a rejection of the cuLtural values of their time, particuLarLy in reLation to gender expectations. The 1959 November edition of Life magazine highLighted that although the Beats were not alone in questioning the value of contemporary society and feeLing stifLed by the suburban conformity of their times, they were the onLy ones to have been sufficientLy moved to reject them by ‘voicing their quarreL with those values’.2 As writers, the cLearest infLuence of the Beats can be seen through their work, most notabLy Kerouac’s On The Road and Ginsberg’s Howl, both of which represent the importance of how popuLar cuLture can potentialLy reveal anxieties and uncertainties about gender ideoLogies often overLooked by historians.3 With reference to these texts, this essay wiLL examine the impact the Beat Generation had on the roLe of men and mascuLinity, their understanding of homosexuality, and how these focuses on being male subsequently affected their attitude towards women and women’s roLe in society. America in the 1950s Given the reactionary nature of the Beats’ ideoLogy to their time, it is important to understand the context within which the Beats were formed and how their own ideas on gender were 1 Stephen Petrus, “RumbLings of Discontent: American PopuLar CuLture and its Response to the Beat Generation, 1957-1960.” Studies in Popular Culture 20 (1997): p. -
Can You See a Virus? the Queer Cold War of William Burroughs
Journal of American Studies, (), , –. Printed in the United Kingdom # Cambridge University Press Can You See a Virus? The Queer Cold War of William Burroughs OLIVER HARRIS I He has fertilized an A to Z of postwar creativity, quite literally from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa; he has acted as godfather for literary countercultures from the Beats to the Cyberpunks; he has haunted our media zones as an icon of iconoclasm – and William Burroughs has remained a critical curse. Leaving aside what Burroughs’ academic marginality tells us – about Burroughs or academia – the main reason he has hexed his critics is also the key to the proliferation of his image and its power of mimetic magic: those he does not repel, Burroughs fascinates. This is the basis to his distinct iconicity, infectious now across four decades. Self-styled as El Hombre Invisible, Burroughs fully inhabits Maurice Blanchot’s construction of fascination as ‘‘the absence one sees because it is blinding’’: ‘‘Whoever is fascinated doesn’t properly speaking, see what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a " distance.’’ Unable or unwilling, Burroughs critics have done little with such knowledge other than to pass it on. Robin Lydenberg, author of the ground-breaking study Word Cultures (), could go back twenty years to quote Joan Didion praising Burroughs for ‘‘a voice so direct and # original and versatile as to disarm close scrutiny of what it is saying’’; so too, Robert Sobieszek in his artwork catalogue Ports of Entry (), could go back twenty to cite Philippe Mikriammos’ formula, ‘‘vox Oliver Harris is a Lecturer in the Department of American Studies, University of Keele, Keele, Staffordshire STBG. -
Becoming-Animal from Queer to Ghost of Chance
humanities Article Baboons, Centipedes, and Lemurs: Becoming-Animal from Queer to Ghost of Chance Alexander Greiffenstern Independent Scholar, Lehener Straße 59, 79106 Freiburg, Germany; [email protected] Abstract: The paper establishes a connection between the becoming-writer of Burroughs, who found his calling and style during the 1950s and his signature characteristic of becoming-animal. This can first be observed in Queer, where Burroughs develops his so-called routine; a short sketch-like text that often involves instances of metamorphosis or transformation. The theoretical background for this short form and the term becoming-animal is taken from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s book on Kafka, who also worked best in short texts and frequently wrote about animals. “The Composite City” may be the central text to understanding Burroughs’ work. It is the text where Burroughs found his style and his identity as a writer. Becoming-animal is a logical consequence that further develops Burroughs’ aesthetic ideal. Over the following decades, he experimented with it in different forms, and toward the end of his career, it became part of an environmental turn. In Ghost of Chance, one can find the same aesthetic ideal that starts Burroughs’ writing in 1953, but the political implications have turned toward saving the lemurs of Madagascar. Keywords: William S. Burroughs; Queer; Ghost of Chance; Yage Letters; Naked Lunch; Madagascar “As a child I had been a great dreamer, bordering on hallucinations which often involved animals. After years of trying to discover who and what I was, I Citation: Greiffenstern, Alexander. suddenly awoke one morning and realized I didn’t care. -
Sexual Mapping in William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Samuel R
University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2009 "Desirable images": Sexual mapping in William S. Burroughs's Naked lunch and Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren Patrick McGowan University of South Florida Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Scholar Commons Citation McGowan, Patrick, ""Desirable images": Sexual mapping in William S. Burroughs's Naked lunch and Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren" (2009). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/2092 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Desirable Images”: Sexual Mapping in William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren by Patrick McGowan A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Michael Clune, Ph.D. Susan Mooney, Ph.D. Shirley Toland - Dix, Ph.D. Date of Approval: April 10, 2009 Keywords: city, frances ferguson, fredric jameson, kevin lynch, pornography, postmodernism, postwar literature, sexuality, michel foucault, michael warner © Copyright 2009 , Patrick Mcgowan Dedication I thank my director, Dr. Michael Clune, and my committee members, Dr. Susan Mooney and Dr. Shirley Toland- Dix, for their invaluable input on this project. Table of Contents Abstract ii Chapter One - Introduction 1 Chapter Two - Samuel R. -
'A Bit out of Line, Somehow': William Burroughs and The
‘A bit out of line, somehow’: William Burroughs and the queer reading the queer In 1986, as an honours student of literature, I was strongly discouraged from writing a dissertation on William Burroughs. It was felt that he had not yet “settled into the canon” (the implication being that he never would), and was in any case insufficiently “literary”. I capitulated and wrote on Tennyson. In the 17 years since then, Burroughs has emerged as a pivotal figure in post-modern American letters, with a continuing stream of academic and biographical studies devoted to him and to the wider milieu of the “Beat generation” writers. In addition, ideas that were being resisted in the South African academy of 1986 have since achieved greater currency, perhaps even a position of dominance, in that very academy. The notion of canonicity itself has been problematized and unpicked by what Harold Bloom, in a rearguard action aimed at keeping alive at least the core of the “Western Tradition”, calls “the school of resentment”1 — meaning previously marginalized ways of writing and reading. But such scholars of resentment (and it’s worth wondering who is doing the resenting) have in fact expanded the canon, or at least the field of possible study, in ways that enrich the whole enterprise immeasurably. Black people, women, and/or gay and lesbian people have helped incorporate into the field of possibility of literary and cultural study both new areas of exploration and a wide diversity of approaches to that study. If Burroughs was deemed too marginal to be tackled academically in 1986, at least in South Africa, today the issue of marginality itself is a key concept in cultural studies. -
William S. Burroughs and Writing the Moroccan Revolution
Interzone’s a Riot: William S. Burroughs and Writing the Moroccan Revolution STACEY ANDREW SUVER A survey of Burroughs Live, a collection of interviews with William S. Burroughs spanning the years between the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959 and his death forty years later, reveals that interviewers made little of his life in Morocco beyond classifying it as Just another curious fact in an already scandalous biography of a homosexual and sometime heroin addict who felt at odds with his own government.1 Indeed, despite living in Tangier’s International Zone from 1954 through its dissolution following Moroccan independence two years later, Burroughs was far more likely to be asked his opinion about United States politics than his views on Moroccan politics.2 This proved true even in the 1960s, when he still spent much of his time in Tangier. Critics such as John Tytell and Mary McCarthy have long argued that Burroughs’s work frames a reaction against the restrictive US political climate of the time: the cold war, suburbanization, McCarthyism, and American exceptionalism.3 However, anticolonial violence in Tangier had, I will contend, a profoundly significant impact on Burroughs’s writing. Reacting against US authoritarianism is indeed an important component of Burroughs’s oeuvre, but its primacy has tended to overshadow the equally significant influence of the nationalist violence and anticolonial riots the writer witnessed in Tangier. Burroughs’s biographers have typically underemphasized the influence of the more violent aspects of the revolution on his creative output. Even Ted Morgan’s excellent Literary Outlaw glosses over the bloody riots. -
William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch: Drugs, Satire, and the Metaphor of Control
William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch: Drugs, Satire, and the Metaphor of Control Senior Paper Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For a Degree Bachelor of Arts with A Major in Literature at The University of North Carolina at Asheville Spring 2007 By Richard Jeremy Parrish Thesis Director Dr. Gwen Ashburn Thesis Advisor Dr. Lori Horvitz Parrish 1 William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch: Drugs, Satire, and the Metaphor of Control "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!" -Dante, Inferno III.9 Naked Lunch, the 1959 magnum opus that won its writer, William S. Burroughs, international fame as, among other things, an avant-garde satirist and a central figure in the Beat movement, is a work of rare, brutal flagrancy and intensity. A novel in terms only of its packaging, it is a disconnected, amorphous, and jarring text that, as goes the legend, is compiled from the notes of a schizophrenic but savagely satirical talent~a talent that developed its wry, misanthropic voice in the social and technological Petri dish of the post-war global milieu and articulated the dark potentials of humanity in practiced cadences of American gutter-speak. In the book's retrospectively-written introduction (now an appendix), "Deposition: Testimony Concerning A Sickness," Burroughs provides a key to its intended effect on "civilized countries," exhorting, ". let them see what they actually eat and drink. Let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon" (205). The effect of discomfit is clearly Naked Lunch's fundamental raison d'etre, but as viscerally as it continues to be felt by readers, the moral purpose can still be hard to discern. -
Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature Zachary Mccleod Hutchins, Editor, Community Without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act Kate A
WORLDBeat Generation Writing BEATS and the Worlding of U.S. Literature JIMMY FAZZINO World Beats re-Mapping the transnational A Dartmouth Series in American Studies series editor Donald E. Pease Avalon Foundation Chair of Humanities Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute Dartmouth College The emergence of Transnational American Studies in the wake of the Cold War marks the most significant reconfiguration of American Studies since its inception. The shock waves generated by a newly globalized world order de- manded an understanding of America’s embeddedness within global and local processes rather than scholarly reaffirmations of its splendid isolation. The se- ries Re-Mapping the Transnational seeks to foster the cross-national dialogues needed to sustain the vitality of this emergent field. To advance a truly compar- ativist understanding of this scholarly endeavor, Dartmouth College Press wel- comes monographs from scholars both inside and outside the United States. For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.upne.com. Jimmy Fazzino, World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature Zachary McCleod Hutchins, editor, Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act Kate A. Baldwin, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease, American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning Towards the Transpacific Melissa M. Adams-Campbell, New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alterna- tives to Companionate Marriage David LaRocca and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, editors, A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture Elèna Mortara, Writing for Justice: Victor Séjour, the Mortara Case, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations Rob Kroes, Prison Area, Independence Valley: American Paradoxes in Political Life and Popular Culture Jimmy Fazzino World Beats Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S.