Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "If the following study were to be a purely descriptive account of the cultural matrix of (post)modernism, we would have to begin with modernism, as..." (more)
Key Phrases: Naked Lunch, Western Lands, Nova Express (more...)

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Product Description

William S. Burroughs is one of the twentieth century's most visible, controversial, and baffling literary figures. In the first comprehensive study of the writer, Timothy S. Murphy places Burroughs in the company of the most significant intellectual minds of our time. In doing so, he gives us an immensely readable and convincing account of a man whose achievements continue to have a major influence on American art and culture. Murphy draws on the work of such philosophers as Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also investigates the historical contexts from which Burroughs's writings arose. From the paranoid isolationism of the Cold War through the countercultural activism of the sixties to the resurgence of corporate and state control in the eighties, Burroughs's novels, films, and music hold a mirror to the American psyche. Murphy coins the term "amodernism" as a way to describe Burroughs's contested relationship to the canon while acknowledging the writer's explicit desire for a destruction of such systems of classification. Despite the popular mythology that surrounds Burroughs, his work has been largely excluded from the academy of American letters. Finally here is a book that presents a solid portrait of a major artistic innovator, a writer who combines aesthetics and politics and who can perform as anthropologist, social goad, or media icon, all with consummate skill.

From the Inside Flap

"Makes a powerful claim for the centrality of Burroughs's work in twentieth-century American fiction, and is critical to our understanding of the possibilities of radical political change in the so-called 'postmodern' era of American culture. Nobody discussing Burroughs henceforth will be able to ignore Murphy's book."--Steven Shaviro, University of Washington

"I think it is a robust addition to the canon of studied interpretation of WSB's art (and life) in the historical context."--James Grauerholz of William Burroughs Communications

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (January 5, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520209508
• ISBN-13: 978-0520209503
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,711,219 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book I wish I'd written -- outstanding scholarship, August 2, 2000

By	In One Ear Out Your Mother (Spotswood, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Paperback)

Timothy S. Murphy has contributed an extraordinary study, a book that finally does justice to the Burroughs canon, reading his work in the hypercritical line of Swift, Orwell, and Ralph Ellison, an unrepentant political literature firing the engines of social change. Readers of Burroughs scholarship are all too familiar with the widespread academic attempt to "postmodernize" him, of a reflexive poststructuralism which consigns his work to the a-referential abyss of a Robbe-Grillet, or a John Barth, an insular, disconnected fantasy-realm of linguistic wordplay bouncing off the padded walls of introversion. Murphy has arrived to correct these academic non-readers, quick to point out that Burroughs's first book, *Junky*(1953), was nothing if not trenchant social critique, his later, more well-known novels (*Naked Lunch*, the Red Night trilogy) simply a more sophisticated apparatus for exploring these same social issues, the perverse realms of technocratic subjugation, the sexually charged resistance of a socio-guerrilla liberation movement.... The great intertextual encounter is between Burroughs and French uber-theorist Gilles Deleuze, whom Murphy powerfully invokes as one of the few theoretical approaches that can give Burroughs his critical due. When Murphy wrote to Deleuze asking the philosopher's position on the Burroughs corpus, he replied that his own work "'can bear [comparison] on three points (the idea of a body without organs; control as the future of societies; the confrontation of tribes or populations in abandoned [disaffected] spaces).'... [Thus,] Burroughs and Deleuze rely, not on the permanent grounding of truth (and Law) in modernist myth, but on the fluid mechanisms of desire in fantasy for their amodernist utopian drive. [Murphy's] task, then, is to see how such an amodern libidinal or *fantasmatic* politics WORKS in the writings of Burroughs and Deleuze"(7). The sadness of Murphy's book is his revelation that Burroughs was never really able to discover or originate the revolutionary constructs he so dearly wrote after, that in the afterbirth of each new book the scales had to be reset, the war-machine dismantled, the battle plan abandoned in search of *yet* another reality-engine. Yet Murphy's knowledge and scholarly rendition of this trajectory, one of the most critically underrated careers in American letters, has given Burroughs back to us, has rendered the most powerful scholarly defense of his work I've yet encountered. This definitive volume, currently in exile, will hopefully be reissued soon, so that it may reach the wide audience it deserves. (Lately I've seen spine-rolled copies in my university bookstore's remaindered bin, quite disheartening.) It is certainly a text to be taught, to be pored over, to be dearly grateful for.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wising Up the Marks: A Review., March 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Paperback)

Alongside the earlier works by Eric Mottram and Jennie Skerl, Mr. Murphy offers the reader an insight into the life of William Burroughs as well an in depth analysis of his works. ''Wising Up the Marks'' is an indispensable work for both the Burroughs's collector and academic historian alike.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wising Up the Marks: A Review., March 25, 2000

By A Customer

Alongside the earlier works by Eric Mottram and Jennie Skerl, Mr. Murphy offers the reader an insight into the life of William Burroughs as well an in depth analysis of his works. ''Wising Up the Marks'' is an indispensable work for both the Burroughs's collector and academic historian alike.