Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Burroughs, William S. - Dennis A. Foster (essay date 1997)

Dennis A. Foster (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: Foster, Dennis A. “Fatal West: W. S. Burroughs's Perverse Destiny.” In Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature, pp. 130-52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Foster examines Burroughs's rejection of the values of Western civilization.]

Shortly before the suicide of Kurt Cobain, lead singer for the group Nirvana, I heard a cultural commentator say that if you find a kid who listens to Cobain and reads W. S. Burroughs, chances are he also uses heroin. A recent television advertisement for workout shoes featured Burroughs extolling the virtues of technology, his familiar image (black suit and hat, gaunt face) on a micro TV that lies like junk in a wet alley while a high-tech-shod urban youth runs past. In the film Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Burroughs appears briefly as the priest-turned-junkie who had introduced the protagonist...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass