William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination
by Oliver Harris
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Description
Unraveling the mysteries of Naked Lunch, exploring the allure of fascination William Burroughs is both an object of widespread cultural fascination and one of America's great writers. In this study, Oliver Harris elucidates the complex play of secrecy and revelation that defines the allure of fascination. Unraveling the mystifications of Burroughs the writer, Harris discovers what it means to be fascinated by a figure of major cultural influence and unearths a secret history behind the show more received story of one of America's great original writers. In William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, Harris examines the major works Burroughs produced in the 1950s--Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters, and Naked Lunch--to piece together an accurate, material record of his creative history during his germinal decade as a writer. Refuting the "junk paradigm" of addiction that has been used to categorize and characterize much of Burroughs' oeuvre, Harris instead focuses on the significance of Burroughs' letter writing and his remarkable and unsuspected use of the epistolary for his fiction. As Burroughs said to Allen Ginsberg about Naked Lunch, "the real novel is letters to you." Drawing on rare access to manuscripts, the book suggests new ways of comprehending Burroughs's unique politics and aesthetics and offers the first accurate account of the writing of Naked Lunch. show lessTags
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Author Information
6+ Works 56 Members
Oliver Harris is a professor in the School of American Studies at Keele University in Staffordshire, England.
Common Knowledge
- People/Characters
- William S. Burroughs
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Literature Studies and Criticism, LGBTQ+
- DDC/MDS
- 813.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1945-1999
- LCC
- PS3552 .U75 .Z69 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1961-
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 24
- Popularity
- 1,110,757
- Rating
- (5.00)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
