| This thesis explores those works of William S. Burroughs which were formed out of the inchoate bulk of writings he labeled "Interzone," specifically Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. As an artifact of Cold War episteme, Interzone details the historical dialectic and reproduces those ideologies in a Lacanian sense so that any articulation outside ideology is unrealizable. As Burroughs rails against control mechanisms, his language, both symbolic and rhetorical, divulges a subsumption into the greater Symbolic order. Burroughs, like any subject articulated by the big Other, is unable to entirely divorce himself from the presuppositions and prejudices of his Symbolic position, most clearly designated by his idiosyncratic Orientalism—those prejudices qua ideology are revealed in his early work and are singularly valuable in discerning the dialectic of the Cold War era. |
