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This chapter examines William S. Burroughs’ late trilogy of novels—Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987)—as a critical response to American neoliberalism. It analyzes what Burroughs terms the trilogy’s retroactive utopianism, or the way in which it reactivates the potential of historical revolutions (including the American Revolution and the global revolts of the 1960s) as a way of reimagining the future of global politics. Focusing on The Place of Dead Roads, the chapter shows how Burroughs combines science fiction and the Western to envision the Frontier in utopian terms. It argues that Burroughs’s fiction builds on the politics of the multitude, or the antisystemic politics of the late 1990s to the present, articulating a vision of the nation in terms of communal property, egalitarian relations, and democratic self-rule.

This short Afterword concludes the book with a comparison between the post-World War I novels at issue and Burroughs's post-World War II novel. Burroughs's autobiographical novel seems at first glance a world away from the sublimations, projections, obfuscations, and tragic romanticisms of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. But on closer inspection, and despite the thrust of the Prologue and its conclusion that the narrator's drug addiction stems from a lack of motivation, Burroughs (along with his narrator) wanted to become an officer in World War II, but he was stymied in his substantial efforts to do so, much like the 1920s authors. Thus, his 1950s postmodern novel of “absent desire,” like the 1920s modernist novels of “impossible love,” is, on another level, a tale of a love or desire unrequited by the military. Given the US involvement in war in the 20th century — and the tremendous social upset, or accelerated modernizing, that mobilizing for world wars involves — along with the fact that the military was something like the supreme arbitrator of manhood in the world war eras, it is not surprising that there is a rich vein of what be called mobilization fiction in American literature, but it is a vein that has so far been mostly untapped.

This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Burroughs explores the culture of Mexico and studies Aztec and Maya history half-heartedly, living contentedly with Joan and the children. The couple lives a self-destructive lifestyle, and tragedy strikes when Joan is shot by Burroughs accidentally. The section includes a piece by Burroughs himself, “My Most Unforgettable Character.”

This chapter highlights symmetries between Cronenberg’s film of Naked Lunch and several other literary adaptations that proved central to 1990s-era New Queer Cinema, a movement that nonetheless discounted Cronenberg entirely. Next, it draws out analogies linking the more expansive, chaotic, and illusory world of Naked Lunch (as compared to Dead Ringers) to the “derationalized” grammars of post–World War II cinema that Deleuze evokes in his book Cinema 2 (as compared with its predecessor, Cinema 1). After analyzing the notorious “sex-blob” sequence as a pivotal illustration of how the movie derationalizes desire, the chapter defends Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch against charges of straightening and commodifying the revolutionary legacy of William S. Burroughs. Lastly, John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006), with its infamous scenes of “actual sex,” reveals how comparably counter-cultural but more eagerly embraced examples of queer cinema may perpetuate clichés about gender and desire in ways Cronenberg’s work avoids.

This chapter presents a reading of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. It discusses his articulation of three forms of materiality in the emerging era of globalization and biopolitics: the linguistic, the bodily, and the political economic. The novel reflects the life of early twentieth-century experimentalists and surrealists, and describes the postmodern period of fiction, globalization, neoliberal biopolitics, and immaterial production. It suggests that people need to be mindful to the most obscene and degraded forms of material existence that are directly shaped by biopolitics and thanatopolitics if they want to see the possibility of a better future.

This chapter considers the work and life of William S. Burroughs, and proposes that Naked Lunch (1959) constructs something like a nightmare image of Latourian sociality: a collective of human subjects and nonhuman objects governed by the logic of putrefaction, or “translation” run amok. The novel not only visualizes a welter of “literal garbage” decomposing in a dumpsite, which Burroughs names the “junk world,” but also assumes the formal structure of a landfill, a site governed by the logic of putrefaction. In other words, rather than simply representing the dump, Burroughs enacts a mimetic relation to it, thereby converting spatial into literary form.

Discusses the religious significances of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and the Beat movement. Argues Burroughs is an outlier figure. Kerouac in particular exemplifies American religious immediatism.

As Wojnarowicz’s waterfront writing developed in the late 1970s, he looked for new ways to represent the strange temporality of the ruined waterfront. The figure of the ghost became the ideal symbol with which to articulate the experience of cruising there. He produced the photographic series Arthur Rimbaud in New York, placing the nineteenth-century French poet in sites that Wojnarowicz himself frequented, including the derelict piers and warehouses of the waterfront. In his writing, Wojnarowicz took up cross-temporal invitations of connection and erotic communion found in the work of writers such as Walt Whitman and William S. Burroughs. In this chapter, I explore the development of Wojnarowicz’s ghostly idiolect in the late 1970s and early 1980s through a hauntological investigation of my own, examining the erotic possibilities it offered him and the queer new personal temporalities he generated through it. Through close reading, I trace a cross-generational history of literature in ruins and by the sea that positions Wojnarowicz’s waterfront writing within a broader social and cultural context, effecting a rich, interdisciplinary interpretation of his creative practice, as well as exploring his own influence on contemporary artists like Emily Roysdon.

This concluding chapter looks at American writer William Burroughs. In many respects, William Burroughs was an apostle of invisibility, assiduously pursuing versions of physical vanishing and advocating, above all, authorial disappearance. He has on occasion declared himself simply an ethereal medium through which his texts pass into the visible world. Samuel Beckett's initial rejection on first meeting Burroughs in 1959 was not solely or particularly to the aleatory nature of the process but to the fact that the cut up method of Burroughs involved using the writing of other authors. Burroughs's reply to such charges generally suggested what one might call today intertextuality — that all writing was cut up or collage in one way or another and that his was different from those only by degree.

This chapter will focus on the important Amazonian hallucinogenic drink – yagé, also known as ayahuasca. It discusses, in turn, oral and written accounts of yage by indigenous Amazonians, Creole, and non-Latin American story-tellers and writers, including José Eustasio Rivera and William Burroughs. Prominent in all these Putumayan yage-narratives are descriptions of out-of-body experiences – of people traversing underwater and aerial dimensions, metamorphosing into animal form, or seeing far-off events. The narratives are characterized by fragmentation and non-linearity, and often try to convey heightened sensory perception through montage and synaesthesia. By comparing the content and, in particular, the style of these narratives, this chapter argues that there is, so to speak, a ‘yage aesthetics’ – a way of writing or speaking about the drug which transcends national, cultural, or linguistic borders.

The first part of this biography describes Burroughs’s identity as a self-destructive young man, still uncertain about being a writer, and having just graduated from Harvard and keeping literary and intellectual company. After some trouble with illegal substances, he and Joan Vollmer flee to Mexico.

This chapter traces the fortunes of the interview in the years after the Second World War. At mid-century the interview was becoming increasingly associated with the surveillance of citizens and cybernetics. In turn, interviews were no longer considered a product of co-production but rather as an interrogative profiling device—as publicized by Senator McCarthy among others. Innovative broadcasters such as Mike Wallace began to adopt their own interrogative style of interviewing toward the profilers in an attempt to foster a critically engaged citizenry. But it was in the infamous Treason case of Ezra Pound that questions around the subject’s analytical control in the era of New Criticism came to a head for the literary community. Meanwhile, for some avant-garde authors including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the interrogative possibilities of interviewing established it as a useful means for creating a countercultural project able to counter New Criticism.

This chapter examines sound poetry, a speculative form that presaged the digital, and the reduction of sound to phonetic material characterized by modularity and “cut-upability.” Focusing on several writers and artists, from 1920s sound poets such as Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters to Henri Chopin, Brion Gysin, and William Burroughs, it illustrates the double movement of the voice in contemporary sound poetry and art. This double movement seeks to make the body enter language again while also playing with the way technology allows the voice to be radically separated from the body.

While speech and bodily posturing offer two distinct if interrelated approaches to communication, consumption offers a new angle on what it means to communicate as a nationalized subject. This chapter focuses on the consumption of tourism as exemplified by the American Express Company, including the sanitized reading materials deployed in its massive expansion of family-oriented, middle-class international travel. Yet some of the company’s most enthusiastic consumers were countercultural writers who co-opted the company’s advertisements, pamphlets, travelers checks, and brand in order to insert their experimental literary works into a broader field of national-corporate discourse. The counterculture, this chapter argues, was opposed to corporate culture in theory, yet its intimacies were sustained by American Express’s global network of office spaces, financial instruments, and writing technologies. In American Express’s corporate archives, as well as in novels by James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room), William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Erica Jong (Fear of Flying), and, most explicitly, Gregory Corso (The American Express), the chapter identifies an aesthetic of literary branding: one crafted to communicate a queer sense of national belonging. These novels introduced countercultural writers to businessmen eager to read their fiction and to co-opt the interaction rituals of the counterculture as representative of American freedom.

This chapter describes William Gibson's early years based on his autobiographical sketch, “Since 1948,” first posted to his blog on November 6, 2002. There, he relates the generally familiar story of how he was born in South Carolina and, as a child, frequently moved with his parents because of his father's various jobs. In these early years, the major influence on Gibson's life was television. This chapter first considers Gibson's childhood and adolescence before discussing how he discovered science fiction literature, which became his passion. It then considers the change in Gibson's perception of science fiction beginning in 1962, which he often attributes to his chance discovery of William S. Burroughs and, through him, other Beat Generation writers. It also looks at Gibson's publication of fanzines, his enthusiasm about Fritz Leiber, and how he developed an interest in science fiction poetry and later in nonfiction. Finally, the chapter documents the turbulent events of Gibson's first two decades of his life and notes that since the 1980s, his life has been remarkably uneventful.