Cities of the Red Night: Inscribing William Burroughs in the Carnivalesque Tradition

Daniel Pastor GARCİA

Makale detayları

Cities of the Red Night: Inscribing William Burroughs in the Carnivalesque Tradition

Yazarlar:

Daniel Pastor GARCİA

Yayıncı:

American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT)

Dergi:

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 2002 Issue 16, pp.31-40

Belge Tipi:

Makale

Yayın Tarihi:

9/2002

Belge Dili:

İngilizce

Document ID (Org No.):

2000735039

Sıklık:

İki Yıllık

pISSN:

1300-6606

Özet:

 

The work of William Burroughs shocks and provokes—it cannot leave  the reader indifferent. Critical opinion on his novels has ranged from the  most scathing condemnation to the highest praise. Those who condemn his  work usually do so because they see it as both obscene and worthless, a mad  jumble of words, most of them offensive, which rarely seem to make any  sense. Even those readers who are not offended by the explicit language and  violent scenes are usually left wondering where it all leads to, what it means,  and rarely think it worth the time to try and work it out. Burroughs is not an  easy writer to read. The average reader is guided by convention—novelistic  conventions, which, as we know them, are put to work in a novel in order to  give an impression of verisimilitude, of "realism." One expects a novel to  create characters with some psychological depth, to develop a story line  more or less chronologically, with a beginning, a middle and an end, even if  one is prepared to accept that they do not appear in that order in a given  novel. The modern reader is also prepared to accept interior monologue and  stream of consciousness as being "real" in a psychological sense, and these  techniques have already become conventions in the modern novel. When  even these conventions are thrown to the wind, however, the reader is  disconcerted, and can react in two ways: he or she can either reject the whole  work as incomprehensible or can accept what is presented and begin to look  at the novel in a new way. The very meaning of "realism," "representation,"  "signification," "language," and even "logic" are called into question in  Burroughs’ work, and his readers are invited not only to look at novels and  writing in a new way, but to question such concepts as illusion, reality, time,  space, control, and freedom.

Makale detayları

Cities of the Red Night: Inscribing William Burroughs in the Carnivalesque Tradition

Yazarlar: Daniel Pastor GARCİA

Yayıncı: American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT)

Dergi: Journal of American Studies of Turkey 2002 Issue 16, pp.31-40

Belge Tipi: Makale

Yayın Tarihi: 9/2002

Belge Dili: İngilizce

Document ID (Org No.): 2000735039

Sıklık: İki Yıllık

pISSN: 1300-6606

Sayı

Yazarlar:

Daniel Pastor GARCİA

Yayıncı:

American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT)

Dergi:

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 2002 Issue 16, pp.31-40

Belge Tipi:

Makale

Yayın Tarihi:

9/2002

Belge Dili:

İngilizce

Document ID (Org No.):

2000735039

Sıklık:

İki Yıllık

pISSN:

1300-6606