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The years following World War II symbolized a new beginning for the United States. While at the height of global power, Americans founds that they were able to experience a leisurely existence where items, desired instead of necessary, could be purchased by almost anyone. This increased prosperity, however, also caused a rise in the number of addicts that included not only the hard-core drug users, but "junkies" who were addicted to filling the emptiness within through the use of illegal drugs to television to sex in order to do so. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of the rise of addicts following World War II, using the literature of addiction in order to elucidate the reasoning behind this surge. Contemporary American authors formed a new genre of writing, "junkie literature," which chronicles the rise of addiction and juxtaposes questions of identity and the use of "junk." Burroughs's Junky and Trocchi's Cain's Book are among the first to represent the shift in the postwar years between earlier narratives of addiction and the rise of junkie literature through an erasure of previously held beliefs that addiction was the result of a moral vice rather than a disease. Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Ann Marlowe's How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, and Linda Yablonsky's The Story of Junk continue this trend of semi-autobiographical writing in an effort to show the junkie's identity in society, as well as the way addiction mirrors capitalism and consumerism as a whole. Finally, Hubert Selby's Requiem for a Dream, Bret Easton Ellis's Less than Zero, and John Updike's Rabbit at Rest explore a different kind of junk addiction, focusing on the use of television, diet pills, sex, cocaine, and food to fill an ineffable void inside that the characters of the novels find themselves unable to articulate. Using Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, as well as various socio-historical critics, this dissertation investigates the rise of addiction narratives in the postwar years, linking the questions of identity to consumerism in contemporary American culture.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English Language and Literature, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 396-399).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-295).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2000. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 277 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 268-277).

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William Burroughs's profane life has been an affront to conventional morality, and his transgressive works have strained against the thematic and formal boundaries of literature. Although he has remained a problematic figure, he is gradually gaining recognition as a literary innovator. This thesis argues that his writings may be understood as technologies of the self, that is, the texts are tools that the writer Oses to transform himself. The Introduction outlines the problems that his writings pose for criticism; provides an overview of critical responses to his work; and demonstrates the appropriateness of Michel Foucault's theory of the technologies of the self as an approach to his texts. Furthermore, it makes a comparison between Burroughs's concerns and similar concerns evident in Foucault. The most prominent of these is a fear of control, and a desire to escape from control. It is argued that this similarity arises from the writers' shared experience of homosexuality in the twentieth century. This experience provokes them to undertake a·work of homographesis, in which they attempt to undermine the construction of identity in text, whilst simultaneously reinscribing identity in problematized autobiographical writing. Chapter One provides a corrective to the critical neglect of Burroughs's homosexuality and focuses on his sexual problematic as a key factor in the development of his literary style. It argues that the writer has an abject imagination that was precipitated by three principal traumatic experiences: his homosexuality, his addiction to opiates, and the accidental shooting of his wife. The chapter examines the way that the writer develops his unique literary style, the routine, in an attempt to express his psychic disintegration. The routine becomes the basic building block of Naked Lunch, serving both as a cathartic release of psychic anguish and as an attempt to subvert repressive social and linguistic structures. The metaphor of the anal aesthetic is introduced to describe the intersection of linguistic, psychic and political strategies in the texts. Chapter Two addresses the period,subsequent to Naked Lunch, in which Burroughs experimented extensively with the cut-up technique to develop a form of aleatory collage. The chapter argues that the writer hoped that the technique would enable him to transform himself and to~discover a new way of thinking, but suggests that its extreme nature both isolated him from his audience and intensified his psychic abjection. Chapter Three follows on from this to argue that the writer responds to the limitations of the cut-up in The Wild Boys by returning to a more intelligible form of writing. This return corresponds with an attempt to inscribe homosexual themes into his work directly. However, the combination of a homosexual agenda and the writer's defence against the identity loss of abjection leads him to assert a radical masculine identity that causes him to perceive women as the chief perpetrators of control. As a result, he rejects women from his mythological system. Chapter Four suggests that in Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads the writer moves away from the radical queer agenda of The Wild Boys in the hope of discovering a form of ethics that avoids the traps of universalized humanism and the harsh "othering" of the queer agenda. The chapter draws a parallel between Burroughs's individualized ethics and Foucault's idea of an ethics grounded in aesthetic self-fashioning. Chapter Five examines The Western Lands, in which the writer confronts death in order to discover the nature of individual value in a normalized culture. Like Foucault, Burroughs believes that the most important task in a limited existence is the dandyistic creation of the self.

William S. Burroughs challenges each reader of Naked Lunch to make meaning of its convoluted pages.  This project explores the two crucial keys to fuller understanding of his groundbreaking literary work:  Logic and Ethics. In "Beating the Dead Horse: Deconstructing the Junk Genius of Naked Lunch," I illustrate Burroughs' means of exposing the flawed binaries that undergird the Aristotelian Logic of language.  In Naked Lunch, the author bares the slippery nature of any such Logical language, whereby each word comes with a range of denotations and connotations, all of which shift constantly according to a concomitantly shifting context.  This project primarily explores Burroughs\' means of subverting traditional logic by exposing the flaws that riddle the foundations of language, essentially undermining the syllogistic system via the system (essentially fashioning a word virus/vaccine chain). I also analyze the Ethical grounding of Naked Lunch, which grows directly from Burroughs' logical/linguistic subversions.  Namely, Burroughs sought to expose the problems with the common Utilitarian Ethic that ultimately pushes the individual to the margins while subsuming the individual within the group (a symptom of the binary logical/linguistic systems that pervade thought and encourages othering).  This article provides substantial evidence that links Burroughs\' ethical equations directly from his Algebra of Need to Jeremy Bentham's Hedonistic Calculus. / Master of Arts

This dissertation examines the techniques and themes of William Burroughs by placing him in the American Pragmatist tradition. Chapter One presents a pragmatic critical approach to literature based on Richard Rorty and John Dewey, focusing on the primacy of narration over argumentation, redescription and dialectic, the importance of texts as experiences, the end-products of textual experiences, and the role of critic as guide to experience rather than judge. Chapter Two uses this pragmatic critical lens to focus on the writing techniques of William Burroughs as a part of the American Pragmatist tradition, with most of the focus on his controversial cut-up technique. Burroughs is a writer who upsets many of the traditional expectations of the literary writing community, just as Rorty challenges the conventions of the philosophical discourse community. Chapter Three places Burroughs within a liberal democratic tradition with respect to Rorty and John Stuart Mill. Burroughs is a champion of individual liberty; this chapter shows how Burroughs' works are meant to edify readers about the social, political, biological, and technological systems which work to control individuals and limit their liberties and understandings. The chapter also shows how Burroughs' works help liberate readers from all control systems, and examines the alternative societies he envisions which work to uphold, rather than subvert, the freedom of human beings. Chapter Four concludes by suggesting some of the implications of Burroughs' work in literature, society, and politics, and by showing the value and importance of Pragmatism to the study of American literature and culture.

Texte remanié de: Thesis Ph. D.--Michigan state university, 2004. / Notes bibliogr. Index.