20th century american art history
20th century american literature
A01=Timothy S. Murphy
american art
american culture
american literature
american society
amodernism
Author_Timothy S. Murphy
beat generation
Category=DS
Category=DSA
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Category=GTD
counterculture
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
felix guattari
gilles deleuze
heroin addict
innovative
jean paul sartre
magical themes
mystical themes
naked lunch
occult themes
postmodernism
postmodernity
semiautobiographical
sodomy laws
theodor adorno
visual art
william lee
william s burroughs
Product details
- ISBN 9780520209510
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Jan 1998
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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, Felix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also investigates the historical contexts from which Burroughs' 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' novels, films, and music hold a mirror to the American psyche. Murphy coins the term 'amodernism' as a way to describe Burroughs' 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.
Timothy S. Murphy is Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
