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

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).

In this essay I examine how identity is created in William S. Burroughs two early novels Junky andQueer. The theoretic starting points are Lacans psychoanlytic concepts ”ideal ego”, ”egoideal” and the ”superego” and also queertheory as presented by Tiina Rosenberg in her book Queerfeministisk agenda. The examination contains an analysis of how Burroughs creates identity in both Junky and Queer with main focus on the second novel. I look at how the desire in the maincharacter Lee is described and what the desire is aimed at. In Junky Lee has a need for drugs and in Queer the desire is aimed at sexual contact with other men. I examine how the desire switches between the novels and how it affects his identity. There is a difference in how Lee sees himself and how the people around him sees him. He sees himself as the masculine homosexual man but the society has antoher view of how homosexual men should act and look like, that is the effiminate man. There is a conflict between Lees ideal ego and the ego-ideal wich has great impact on how his identity is formed. There is a gap between his interpretation of himself and how other sees him wich creates a disintegration in his identity. This essay tries to describe how this disintegration in Lees identity appears and how he handles it. Burroughs is wellknown for his so called ”routines”. These are crazy and imaginative monologues created by the maincharacter Lee. In this essay I present these routines as a way for Lee to take back control of his own identity, he uses them as a way to convince his surroundings that he is the masculine homosexual guy with control not the feminine man that other people sees him as. I also examine how the maincharacter Lee reflects Burroughs as his ideal ego. Ginsbergs have said that Queer is ”Burroughs heart laid bare” and that is a central point throughout my essay.

Cette thèse est une étude approfondie du rapport de William S. Burroughs au cinéma. William S. Burroughs, en collaboration avec Antony Balch, a produit entre 1961 et 1972 des courts-métrages expérimentaux aux formes de montage et de figuration radicales. Ces films, largement ignorés, constituent un pan essentiel du cinéma expérimental. Leur étude met en lumière l'évolution d'une pensée politico-esthétique de l'image chez Burroughs, une pensée voisine de celle de Guy Debord et qui influencera celle de Gilles Deleuze .Burroughs a également travaillé en tant qu'acteur : l'analyse de ses apparitions est ici pensée en fonction de leur rapport à l’œuvre écrite de Burroughs et à son versant biographique, l'écrivain déconstruisant les personnages qu'il joue de la même manière qu'il déconstruisait le cinéma. Un ensemble de films, répondant plus ou moins fidèlement à l’appellation d'adaptations, constituent un aspect important de notre corpus. Ces œuvres, qu'elles travaillent les écrits dans un rapport fondé sur la reproduction, le décalage, ou l'éclatement, produisent des formes inédites. Cette étude est complétée par un retour sur l'influence de Burroughs sur trois auteurs majeurs du cinéma nord-américain contemporain, Cronenberg, Van Sant et Lynch. Tous trois réinvestissent l’œuvre et la pensée de Burroughs dans le cadre de leur propre production, que ce retour se concentre sur l'apparition de la voix, le lien entre signature visuelle et présence ou la fragmentation de la narration classique. En mettant en relation expérimentations, présences et contaminations de l'écrivain au cinéma, ce travail vise la réhabilitation de ce versant de l’œuvre de William S. Burroughs. / This work is an exhaustive study of William S. Burroughs' interest in cinema. Burroughs, in collaboration with Antony Balch, produced between 1961 and 1972 a series of experimental short films with radical editing and visual styles. These widely ignored films are an essential part of experimental cinema. Their study highlights the evolution of the author's political and aesthetic vision, close to those of Guy Debord or Gilles Deleuze. Burroughs also worked as an actor. The analysis of his cinematographic apparitions is linked to their relation to Burroughs' written work and its biographical aspects: the writer deconstructs the characters he plays in the same way as he deconstructs the mise-en-scène.A set of films, which can loosely be said to be adaptations, are another important part of the corpus of this study. These works, in a relation to the written word based on reproduction, shift or blow-out, produce original cinematographic images.This study is completed with a flash-forward to Burroughs' influence on three important north-american filmmakers: David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant and David Lynch. These three authors reinvest Burroughs' work within the framework of their own production, focusing on the apparition of the voice, the link between visual signature and the notion of presence or the shattering of a conventional narrative.Linking experimentations, presences and contaminations of the writer in the cinematographic art, this thesis aims to rehabilitate this part of Burroughs' work.

<p>"The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze's American Rhizome" puts four writers - Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, George Jackson and William S. Burroughs - in conjunction with four concepts - becoming-democratic, belief in the world, the line of flight, and finally, control societies. The aim of this study is to elaborate and expand on Gilles Deleuze's extensive use of American literature and to examine possible conjunctions of his philosophy with contemporary American literary criticism and American Studies. I argue that Deleuze's interest in American writing not only productively complicates recent historical accounts of "French Theory's" incursion into American academia, but also provides a compelling way think about the relationship between literature and history, language and experience, and the categories of minor and major that organize national literary traditions. Beginning with the concept of the "American rhizome" this dissertation approaches the question of rhizomatic thought as a constructivist methodology for engaging the relationship between literary texts and broader social movements. Following an introduction laying out the basic coordinates of such an approach, and their historical relevance with respect to the reception of "French Theory" in the United States, the subsequent chapters each take an experimental approach with respect to a single American writer invoked in Deleuze's work and a concept that resonantes with the literary text under consideration. In foregrounding the question of the use of literature this dissertation explores the ways literature has been appropriated, set to work, or dismissed in various historical and institutional arrangements, but also seeks to suggest the possibility of creating conditions in which literature can be said to take on a life of its own.</p> / Dissertation

Créée en 1959 par William S. Burroughs et Brion Gysin, la technique du cut-up repose sur le découpage et le réagencement de fragments de textes d’origines diverses. Burroughs l’applique notamment dans la « trilogie Nova », composée de The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) et Nova Express (1964). Ce procédé de collage littéraire, qui donne à lire un texte extrêmement fragmenté, met en jeu des questions d’ordre esthétique, poétique et politique, révélatrices des évolutions socioculturelles occidentales. Ce travail consiste en une lecture historique du cut-up, qui permet d’éclairer les mutations du collage littéraire au XXe siècle. Ainsi, le cut-up trouve ses origines dans les collages de Tristan Tzara, T.S. Eliot et John Dos Passos, mais s’en distingue à bien des titres, soulignant les caractéristiques du collage littéraire moderniste. Par ailleurs, cette technique d’écriture s’apparente, notamment sur le plan de la réflexion politique, aux travaux de ses contemporains lettristes et situationnistes dans les années cinquante et soixante. Enfin, l’émergence de prolongements du cut-up dans les années soixante-dix et quatre-vingt, aussi bien en Europe qu’aux Etats-Unis, s’observe dans des champs allant de la musique populaire à la littérature, en passant par la poésie sonore. Le cut-up s’inscrit donc dans des espaces intermédiaires, entre le pictural et le littéraire, le modernisme et le postmodernisme, l’avant-garde et la contre-culture, l’Europe et les Etats-Unis. Par les questions qu’il pose, le cut-up apparaît également comme une réflexion sur le langage et plus généralement, comme une nouvelle image de la pensée : en ce sens, il révèle ses affinités conceptuelles avec les philosophies de Jacques Derrida et de Gilles Deleuze. / Pioneered in 1959 by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the cut-up technique consists in cutting and rearranging text segments from various sources. Burroughs uses this technique most notably in The Nova Trilogy composed of The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964). This literary collage process, which results in an extremely fragmented text, challenges issues of an aesthetic, poetic and political nature, and reflects the Western socio-cultural evolutions.This dissertation consists in a historical analysis of the cut-up technique, highlighting how collage methodologies used in literature have evolved during the 20th century. The cut-up method is inspired by the collage techniques used by Tristan Tzara, T.S. Eliot and John Dos Passos, but differs from them in many ways, showcasing the attributes of modernist literary collage methods. At the same time, this writing technique is related to the works by the contemporary Lettrist and Situationist movements from the fifties and the sixties, especially from a political point of view. Finally, the emergence of an extension of cut-up techniques during the seventies and the eighties, both in Europe and in the United States, can be observed in various fields, from popular music to literature, including sound poetry. Therefore, this writing technique takes its place in intermediary areas, between the pictorial and literary worlds, modernism and postmodernism, avant-garde and counterculture, Europe and the United States. Through the questions it raises, the cut-up technique also appears as a reflection on language and, more generally, as a new image of thought, and thus it reveals some of its conceptual affinities with Jacques Derrida’s and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophies.

In this thesis, the practice of Chaos magick and the practice and mythology of Discordianism are compared to different subversive techniques used in internet culture and specifically in internet trolling. Chaos magick is described from the sigil-making of Austin Osman Spare through the playbacks of William S Burroughs to contemporary practitioners. The Chaos magick practices unveiled in this investigation are compared to practices in internet culture and specifically internet trolling through avariety of different themes, from memes to doxing to the chaos of apophenia.

Thus far, the novel Naked Lunch has not been discussed from the aspect of critical animal studies, nor has it been connected to the theories of Michel Foucault. This essay however, argues that these diverse fields could be connected through the use of the simians that are frequently employed in Naked Lunch. By analyzing the metaphorical role of the simian, the structure of the normalization process can be revealed. Therefore the simian’s metaphorical role becomes to reveal the different stages character goes through in that process and ultimately revealing its negative effects. They also prove to employ the role of abnormality which normalization wants to subtract from the human in order to render her docile. By applying the power mechanisms such as signals, the concept of panopticism and the theory of the docile body to specific passages where simians are highly prominent, the claim of this paper can be demonstrated. Besides Foucault, the theories of Robin Lydenberg are also used consistently throughout the essay due to her valuable observations such as the struggle between body and mind.

Cette thèse se propose de dégager les enjeux esthétiques, éthiques et politiques des poésies et pratiques expérimentales de 1960 à 1980, à partir de l’étude des œuvres de J. Blaine, W. S. Burroughs et E. Miccini. Ce travail développe une réflexion sur les expérimentations poétiques qui ont lieu durant une période de fortes mutations sociétales, économiques et médiatiques. Après la mise en place d’une généalogie des pratiques expérimentales que sont le collage et le montage, il s’agit d’inscrire ces poésies expérimentales, généralement occultées des histoires littéraires, dans un modèle néo-avant-gardiste, qui implique une réévaluation de pratiques héritées du début du XXe siècle et un fonctionnement en réseau, faisant dialoguer l’individuel et le collectif. Dès lors, la thèse démontre que le renouvellement du poétique qui s’opère à l’ère d’une société de l’image est tributaire de l’évolution technique : il s’agit de créer avec et contre le livre. Le nouveau rapport entre création poétique et livresque et problématiques de la reproductibilité, favorisée principalement par l’offset, engendre une mise en perspective de l’œuvre avec la notion d’empreinte. L’empreinte constitue ainsi un nouveau paradigme entérinant le statut ontologique instable d’une œuvre qui travaille la matérialité de son support et qui altère une traditionnelle dimension uniquement verbale. La résistance aux formes traditionnelles implique ainsi un engagement, dans la forme et dans le fond : différentes stratégies sont alors développées par les auteurs, permettant d’établir des politiques esthétiques dont l’objectif est de proposer au lecteur/spectateur une expérience esthétique formatrice et éthique. / This thesis aims to identify the aesthetic, ethical and political issues of experimental poetry from 1960 to 1980. It deals with the works of J. Blaine, W. S. Burroughs and E. Miccini. This work offers a reflection upon the poetic experiments taking place during a period of strong societal, economic and media switch. After the establishment of a genealogy of the experimental practices of collage and montage, it is now about placing this experimental poetry in a neo-avant-garde model, which involves a re-evaluation of practices inherited from the beginning of the twentieth century and a functioning in a network, making the individual and the collective dialogue. Henceforth, the thesis shows that the renewal of the poetics that takes place in the era of a society of the image relies on on technical evolution : it is about creating with and against the book. The new relationship between poetic. The new relationship between poetic and book-based creation and issues of reproducibility, mainly by offset, creates a perspective of the work with the notions of imprint and ruin. Thus, the imprint constitutes a new paradigm which endorses the unstable ontological status of a work which works on the materiality of its support and which alters a traditional, only verbal dimension. Resistance to traditional forms implies a commitment, in form and substance : different strategies are then developed by the authors, which allow to establish aesthetic policies of which the aim is to make the reader / spectator access a formative and ethical aesthetic experience.