William Burroughs’s Fiction Essay Example for Free

William Burroughs’s Fiction Essay This paper will contend that William Burroughs’s fiction is aimed at undermining and deconstructing the prevailing social request and standard shows and social practices. In such books as The Western Lands (1987), The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962) or The Nova Express (1964) the writer builds undeniable scholarly bandits †criminals, conmen, and so forth †so as to encapsulate the compelling and ill-conceived manners by which thoughts, feelings or the whole reality can be forced on the segregated other. In this manner, William Burroughs’ books likewise offer an impression of American industrialist society and its strange force relations. This topic will be researched in the novel considering Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle which examines the specular character of the capital society and the holes among the real world and portrayal. In his article on Burroughs, Frederick M. Dolan contends that  in the writer’s books, all the maverick figures â€Å"control others by acing the craft of creating striking and persuading portrayals, misusing the naã ¯ve, mystical inclination to accept that when language shows up generally important, it has on the grounds that it has set up a referential relationship to the world† (Dolan, p. 536). This is definitely what the â€Å"society of the spectacle† is endeavoring to accomplish by superimposing the demonstration of entrepreneur request on ordinary reality. Burroughs was additionally keen on indicating the twisting intensity of language and the manners by which reality can be controlled along these lines. From this point of view, Jacques Derrida’s book, Of Grammatology, will be especially helpful in the examination of Burroughs’s language treatment and of the manners by which the writer’s conscious foregrounding of the holes among signifier and meant sabotage the entrepreneur social request and imbued thought-components. Burroughs impugns contemporary man as machine, as aloof collector of belief system. Works Consulted: Burroughs, William S. The ticket that detonated. Forest Press, 1987. Dolan, Frederick M.  â€Å"The Poetics of Postmodern Subversion: The Politics of Writing in William S. Burroughss The Western Lands†, pp. 534-551. Contemporary Literature  © 1991 University of Wisconsin Press. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Derrida, Jacques: Of Grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Harris, (Oliver C. G.). William Burroughs and the mystery of interest.  Southern Illinois University Press, c2003. Lee, Witness. Word infection : the William S. Burroughs peruser. Forest Press, 1998. - . Nova express. Forest Press, 1965. - . The delicate machine ; Nova express ; The wild young men : three books. Forest Press, 1988. Lydenberg, Robin. Word societies : radical hypothesis and practice in William S. Burroughs fiction. College of Illinois Press, 1987.Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 New York : Zone Books, 1994. New York : Zone Books, 1994. New York : Zone Books, 1994. Morgan, Ted. Scholarly fugitive : the life and times of William S. Burroughs. H. Holt, 1988. Pepper, Andrew. â€Å"State Power Matters: Power, the State, and Political Struggle in the Post-War American Novel†. Printed Practice, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 467-91, December 2005. Philips, James. â€Å"Life in Space: William Burroughs and the Limits of the Society of Control†. Writing and Esthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Esthetics, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 95-112, June 2006. Schneiderman, Davis. Retaking the universe : William S. Burroughs in the period of globalization. Pluto Press, 2004. Sobieszek, Robert A. Ports of passage : William S. Burroughs and expressions of the human experience. Los Angeles County Museum of Art ; 1996.