| As indicated by the dissertation title, William S. Burroughs's narrative strategy is to create, through the use of repetition, mosaics of shifting meanings that are negotiated by readers during the act of reading. Burroughs's novels, then, create unique issues for interpretive methods that seek to trace linear developments of, or external influences on, themes, characters, plots, narrative techniques, etc. through the courses of individual novels or the writer's body of work. The interpretive approach proposed in this dissertation offers an alternative to common critical methods that objectify works of literature in order to place them within familiar, albeit external interpretive frames. Instead, this dissertation outlines an associative reading strategy that requires assiduous engagement with the repetitions of the novels' various characters, themes, phrases, and images allowing for re-signification of all of these through continually changing juxtapositions.;In addition to providing a reading strategy through which to engage works written by and influenced by Burroughs, this associative approach offers a means to reassess works of his literary predecessors and contemporaries that feature similar techniques of dispersal and decentralization. Ultimately, this dissertation's development of an associative, in contrast to linear, interpretive strategy not only provides an effective means to engage the works of William S. Burroughs, but also represents a valuable critical approach to the interpretation of a number of twentieth-century and contemporary experimental texts.;The interpretive strategy proposed by this dissertation draws heavily upon theories of post-structuralism, most especially those of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Lacan. Derrida's discussions of "pharmakon" and "parasitism" are vital to an examination of Burroughs's development of viral language as both a thematic and a technique. Baudrillard's concepts of simulacra and simulation inform discussions of Burroughs's deconstruction of material context and his dislocation of subjectivity. Lacan's theories of desire and the gaze provide insight into Burroughs's subversion of binary relationships, especially as it concerns, word, image, and subjectivity. The theories of all three are essential to the postulation of a decentralized narrative subjectivity in Burroughs's novels, which mediates the negotiation of meaning in the texts. |
