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Title: Wising Up the Marks: The Novels of William S. Burroughs by Timothy S. Murphy ISBN: 0-520-20951-6 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: January, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A book I wish I'd written -- outstanding scholarship
Comment: Timothy S. Murphy has contributed an extraordinary study, a book that finally does justice to the Burroughs canon, reading his work in the hypercritical line of Swift, Orwell, and Ralph Ellison, an unrepentant political literature firing the engines of social change. Readers of Burroughs scholarship are all too familiar with the widespread academic attempt to "postmodernize" him, of a reflexive poststructuralism which consigns his work to the a-referential abyss of a Robbe-Grillet, or a John Barth, an insular, disconnected fantasy-realm of linguistic wordplay bouncing off the padded walls of introversion. Murphy has arrived to correct these academic non-readers, quick to point out that Burroughs's first book, *Junky*(1953), was nothing if not trenchant social critique, his later, more well-known novels (*Naked Lunch*, the Red Night trilogy) simply a more sophisticated apparatus for exploring these same social issues, the perverse realms of technocratic subjugation, the sexually charged resistance of a socio-guerrilla liberation movement.... The great intertextual encounter is between Burroughs and French uber-theorist Gilles Deleuze, whom Murphy powerfully invokes as one of the few theoretical approaches that can give Burroughs his critical due. When Murphy wrote to Deleuze asking the philosopher's position on the Burroughs corpus, he replied that his own work "'can bear [comparison] on three points (the idea of a body without organs; control as the future of societies; the confrontation of tribes or populations in abandoned [disaffected] spaces).'... [Thus,] Burroughs and Deleuze rely, not on the permanent grounding of truth (and Law) in modernist myth, but on the fluid mechanisms of desire in fantasy for their amodernist utopian drive. [Murphy's] task, then, is to see how such an amodern libidinal or *fantasmatic* politics WORKS in the writings of Burroughs and Deleuze"(7). The sadness of Murphy's book is his revelation that Burroughs was never really able to discover or originate the revolutionary constructs he so dearly wrote after, that in the afterbirth of each new book the scales had to be reset, the war-machine dismantled, the battle plan abandoned in search of *yet* another reality-engine. Yet Murphy's knowledge and scholarly rendition of this trajectory, one of the most critically underrated careers in American letters, has given Burroughs back to us, has rendered the most powerful scholarly defense of his work I've yet encountered. This definitive volume, currently in exile, will hopefully be reissued soon, so that it may reach the wide audience it deserves. (Lately I've seen spine-rolled copies in my university bookstore's remaindered bin, quite disheartening.) It is certainly a text to be taught, to be pored over, to be dearly grateful for.
Rating: 5
Summary: Wising Up the Marks: A Review.
Comment: Alongside the earlier works by Eric Mottram and Jennie Skerl, Mr. Murphy offers the reader an insight into the life of William Burroughs as well an in depth analysis of his works. ''Wising Up the Marks'' is an indispensable work for both the Burroughs's collector and academic historian alike.
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Title: Burroughs Live: The Collected Interview of Wiliam S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 (Double Agents) by William S. Burroughs, Sylvère Lotringer, Sylvere Lotringer ISBN: 1584350105 Publisher: Semiotext(e) Pub. Date: 01 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker by William S. Burroughs, Victor Bockris ISBN: 0312147678 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: December, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959 by Oliver Harris, William S. Burroughs ISBN: 0140094520 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1994 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination by Oliver Harris ISBN: 0809324849 Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S.Burroughs by Ted Morgan ISBN: 0805009019 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: October, 1988 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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