Retaking the universe

It's been a while since I've looked at the excellent website, Reality Studio, which is a great source of material about William Burroughs. One of the most exciting additions is a free download of Retaking the universe, edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh which was instrumental in reinvigorating Burroughs' criticism. This is well worth downloading.







There's also, a new introduction by Edward S. Robinson, 'The Burroughs Conundrum', part of which is included below:

The Burroughs Conundrum

Problematizing Criticism

by Edward S. Robinson

On its first publication in 2004, Retaking the Universe marked the dawn of a new era in critical writing on William S. Burroughs. Burroughs had died seven years previous and his voice still echoed around the peripheries of mainstream culture, while his name was synonymous, in certain circles at least, with postmodernism and countercultural cool. The frequency with which Burroughs was cited by writers, artists, musicians, critics and commentators did not obviously correspond with the level of critical attention his writing had received at that point. Of course, mainstream popularity and academic discourse are often entirely separate spheres, but Burroughs wasn’t mainstream per se: moreover, he had long been hailed in some quarters as one of the most innovative writers of the late twentieth century. That the emergence of Burroughs as a writer corresponds with the emergence of postmodernism is by no means purely coincidental, and one could justly claim Burroughs’ work exemplified postmodernism in practice before a theoretical framework had been constructed to accommodate such modes of literature. Yet, despite Fredric Jameson and a handful of other notable theorists citing Burroughs as one of the progenitors of postmodern fiction, few writers on the subject of postmodern literature — or avant-garde literature, for that matter — had taken this citation further and substantiated their observations with detailed critical analysis. Retaking the Universe was appropriately titled: it strove to redress the balance. It served to reclaim the late Beat author’s rightful place on the critical map as a writer who merited academic scrutiny. Moreover, it broke new ground in responding to Burroughs in a way that reflected the nature of his writing and the theoretical difficulties it posed — and tackled these issues head on. 
Where Retaking the Universe differed from anything that had preceded it lay in that it simultaneously presented a diverse range of perspectives on Burroughs’ writing, from a diverse range of writers. While some well-established and eminent experts in the field were, rightly, present, Retaking the Universe saw the emergence of a new wave of Burroughs researchers, who were digging into the complications of his oeuvre from an unprecedented range of theoretical perspectives, each writer possessing a unique voice and, most importantly, unique approach to Burroughs’ output. In this way, Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh presented a radical new kind of Burroughs criticism, as was fitting to the author’s own output, and in doing so they were making giant leaps to injecting new life into the field.
Yet the appearance of Retaking the Universe signified more than simply a new approach to Burroughs. To pair a brace of thematically-linked metaphors, it was a watershed. It also opened the floodgates, in a way that could not have been predicted in 2004. It may be difficult to countenance now, but there was a time, not so very long ago, that there was a real paucity of Burroughs-related criticism. While it is not uncommon for authors to only receive recognition posthumously, Burroughs’ case is an interesting and unusual one, not least of all on account of the success he achieved in both commercial and critical terms during his lifetime. Although widely reviewed and a popular interview subject throughout his lengthy career — as evidenced by both Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg’s William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception 1959-1989 (1991) and the gargantuan tome that is Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997 (2002) edited by Sylvère Lotringer — serious in-depth analysis of his work remained scant until well after his death. 
During his literary career, which spanned some five decades, Burroughs was the subject of just three monographs of note: William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (1977) by Eric Mottram, Robin Lydenberg’s Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction  (1987) and Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William S. Burroughs (1997) by Timothy Murphy, while Jennie Skerl’s 1985 work, simply entitled William S. Burroughs provided a useful oversight and critique of his output to that point. Large portions of the remaining analysis of Burroughs’ work produced both during his lifetime and subsequently are given to his biography, as represented not only by the two main biographies, in the form of Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw (1991) and Barry Miles’ more commercially-orientated El Hombre Invisible (1992), but also in a number of more recent publications, which include This is the Beat Generation by James Campbell (1999), The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963) by Barry Miles (2000) and The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas by Rob Johnson (2006). This focus on the life experience is something common to the Beat Generation more broadly, and it wouldn’t be entirely unjust to suggest that the lives of Ginsberg and Kerouac are of greater interest to many than their literary output.

Continued here