Department of English and World Languages: Faculty Presentations and Researchhttp://hdl.handle.net/10675.2/6244312024-03-16T15:00:33Z2024-03-16T15:00:33ZThe Flight of the Junky: Existential Posthumanism and Immanent Life in Early BurroughsHoffman, Toddhttp://hdl.handle.net/10675.2/6244342022-10-08T01:52:28Z2022-05-01T00:00:00ZThe Flight of the Junky: Existential Posthumanism and Immanent Life in Early Burroughs
Hoffman, Todd
William Burroughs early book Junky is generally separated from his later experimental fiction. Stylistically it accords much more to realism than the postmodern aleatory method he later innovated. However, Burroughs’ preoccupation with resisting all forms of subjectification, his disenchantment with bourgeois life and his simultaneous literal and tropic use of addiction as a form of flight from powers of normalization and conformity are strongly present in this early work. This paper explores Junky on three fronts. First, it shows the novel as an elaboration of a posthumanist existentialism by emphasizing the materiality of the body through Burroughs’ explanation of the physiological mechanisms of addiction. Through this existentialist posthumanism, the novel critically responds to Sartrian existentialism, which was so fashionable at the time of Burroughs’ writing, and repudiates the Jeffersonian idealization of the transcendental subject and its middle class figurations. The emphasis on the material body simultaneously challenges post-structuralist renderings of Burroughsian readings. This leads to a conception of strategies of flight from all forms of conformity by utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body without Organs and immanent Life. Junk is a vehicle of flight and self-affirmation, a means of highly individualized, libertarian modes of subjective deterritorialization. Addiction and habitual use are not mere uncontrolled thirsts, but forms of actualizing a wholly detached social and independent individual. But the danger of junk lies in its reterritorializing of the body through new assemblages of need and dependence, leading the protagonist to ultimately seek a different mode of escape. Junk illuminates our posthuman existential condition and leads Burroughs to seek new experimental forms of aesthetic expression.
2022-05-01T00:00:00ZThe New Realism: Seeking Alternative to Postmodern PessimismHoffman, Toddhttp://hdl.handle.net/10675.2/6244332022-10-08T01:52:20Z2017-04-01T00:00:00ZThe New Realism: Seeking Alternative to Postmodern Pessimism
Hoffman, Todd
Postmodern pessimism has been newly expressed by Mark Fisher as capitalist realism: the sense that one can't even imagine an alternative to capitalism. Fisher's use of the term realism points to the subjective content of the contemporary capitalist life-world. In contrast, a new brand of realism as assemblage theory has become prominent through Manuel DeLanda: that is, a complex ontology of interwoven networks of immanent unfolding that operate on multiple scales of size. DeLanda supplies a basic ontology of society that, combined with Fisher's sense of realism, elaborates a new potential for socio-economic change. This paper will examine Fisher and DeLanda's views and add the speculative materialist economic work of Benjamin Lozano as a means of bringing the two together.
2017-04-01T00:00:00Z"Waiting for the Spider to Come Home": Mothers and Mothering in Lalita Tademy's Cane RiverWilliams, Seretha D.http://hdl.handle.net/10675.2/3199122023-07-10T19:22:03Z2009-11-01T00:00:00Z"Waiting for the Spider to Come Home": Mothers and Mothering in Lalita Tademy's Cane River
Williams, Seretha D.
2009-11-01T00:00:00Z