Customer Reviews

Retaking The Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization

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This text joins what appears to be a growing number of books collecting critical essays on Burroughs' work.

The attempts to address Burroughs' relevance in the "Age of Globalization" are tenuous at best; Some authors wisely avoid the subject altogether, while others make a very shoddy job of it. It seems this was a term employed just to sell the concept of the book.

The earlier essays in the text, drawing parallels betweens Burroughs' work and other contemporary movements (Surrealism, Dadaism, etc.) are the most valuable.

Halfway through the book, however, one author writes his essay in a way that can only be described as "fan fiction," and things start to go downhill from there. I actually had to stop reading the book toward the very end, in the middle of a ridiculous essay that tried to connect dots between Burroughs and Crowley. There may be some connections worth mentioning between the two, but they were not at all well illustrated here; citing trends in the comic book industry didn't help the authors' cause or credibility. This, after a too long (and very messy) essay that tried to squeeze Burroughs' humor through some of the most excruciatingly dull scholarly language...

That aside, the book was not a total waste of time for this long-time Burroughs scholar. Start with the "At The Front" collection for a much better survey of Burroughs essays through the years.

Even the best ¨critical¨ ¨theory¨ is just stuff that's been made up to sound big and clever - and this anthology's no different. Some of the pieces are better than others - in that they correlate more with my personal prejudices. One might expect a book about WSB and Globalisation to critique Burroughs's engagement with the Control Machine: Nike/Gap ads, work with corp-rockers U2 blah blah, publication by Murdoch and so on. Strangely this is all omitted. There's not much point pretending it didn't happen just coz it's too hard for you. At least WSB never pretended he was a lefty like these guys do.