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On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Naked Lunch Oliver Harris wrote:
"It is a book unlike any other. Famous, infamous, derided, and banned but also recognized as a work of genius. For fifty years, it has tantalized, shocked, baffled, and inspired. It simultaneously holds a significant place in postmodern literature while retaining its iconic, underground allure, resisting diverse critical attempts to define and explain it. It is an aberrant concoction, stylistically brilliant and structurally disorienting, obscene and blasphemous and yet satirically cathartic and redemptive. A drug book-the drug book- which also happens to be morally admonish. A systematic program of speaking the unspeakable. The exorcism of a violent death and years of addiction. A lacerating satire on conformity and authoritarianism and a grotesque indulgence in derangement and possession. The Leviathan of the Nuclear Age and a fairground chamber of horrors. A book of ideas, a book about language, viruses, and control. A queer book and a work of reportage-as straight as it comes. It is the Caliban of the Canon and the Prospero of the Avant-garde.
Fifty years after its original publication and in a new heated-up millennium, it still has the power to shock and delight but remains mysterious and illusive as ever. Ungraspable and delirious, it challenges the critical orthodoxies and politically correct sensibilities of our time. In the twenty-first century, its stature, paradoxically, is as assured and yet as debatable as ever, as if its place in the world is fated to be stellar but unstable, controversial, and finally unassimilable. A dark star, indeed. In certain respects, it is increasingly problematic and challenging, its sexual proclivities and apparent colonialist callousness guaranteed to dismay our cultural and moral arbiters. Which is as it should be: the desire to shock, to rub once face in human ordure, is the book's strategic, perpetual motor. At the same time, its pre-cut-up montage assemblage, its viral obsessions and sexual hard-core, its concern dehumanized control apparatuses (medical, political, technological, criminal, as well those deeply implanted in the psyche) make it a prophetic post-postmodern blueprint for our chaotic digital age, our ravaged, murderous planet and our terrifying yet unimaginable future. Unforgettable and unwished-for, uncanny and utterly unbridled, Gentle Reader, Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury-marks, agents, collaborators, Paregoric Babies of the World: welcome to Naked Lunch. A book-the book-like no other."
The seminar will attempt a close reading of Burroughs' masterwork. There will be a first meeting where I will give an introduction and some reading advise before we have two Friday/Saturday sessions. You should try to read at least parts of Naked Lunch before our first meeting, so that you are aware of the challenges provided by the text.
Requirements:
- Reading the assignments.
- Writing one essay. Due July 2, 2011.
Course Readings:
William Burroughs. Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. Harper Collins, 2005.
There are several editions of The Restored Text that should all have the same pagination. |
