William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination - Hardcover

Harris, Oliver

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809324849 ISBN 13: 9780809324842

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Synopsis

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 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Oliver Harris is a professor in the School of American Studies at Keele University in Staffordshire, England. He is the editor of The Selected Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 and the editor of the fiftieth anniversary edition of Junky. Harris is also the author of numerous scholarly articles on Burroughs, the Beat Generation, film noir, and the epistolary form.

Review:

“ Harris’ s study goes deeply into its subject, providing the valuable service of untangling the manuscripts, repositioning events in chronological time, and drawing sound implications and conclusions from myth and legend.” — Regina Weinreich, American Book Review



“ William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination sets a new standard for Burroughs criticism. The book combines close textual readings, astute analysis and detailed research into the original letters and manuscripts, while drawing on more or less every other critical work on Burroughs published to date.” — Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0809324849
• ISBN 13: 9780809324842
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304