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Abstract: The article deals with the work of the beatnik writer William Burroughs studied in the context of the American literature of his time. As long as the attention of the authors of the article is focused primarily on Burroughs’s novel The Naked Lunch (1959), the context for the novel is made up either by his earlier (Interzone, Junkie) and later (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded) works. Since it is a question of the formation of the postmodern poetics in the novel The Naked Lunch, the relationship between the novel and other modernist and postmodernist works also determines the level of the context. The comparison of The Naked Lunch by Burroughs with another famous text – Thomas Pynchon’s novel V (1961), which is chronologically close to Burroughs’s novel, is presented in more detail. Considering the formation of postmodernism in the creative activity of the beatnik writer, the authors of the article refer to the classification proposed by Ihab Hassan. Although there are numerous works devoted to postmodernism in more recent literary studies, it seems interesting to identify the correspondence of the artistic practice of American novelists to the con-temporary theory. As a result of the comparative analysis, it has been revealed that, on the one hand, the features of modernist poetics, outlined by Hassan, manifested themselves in the texts of different authors not only of the first, but also of the second half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, according to the same classification, it can be stated that in the work of Burroughs there is already a transition from one artistic paradigm to another. Pynchon’s novel V is considered as a landmark work of postmodernism, which clearly demonstrates the specific features and possibilities of postmodern poetics.

About the author(s) :

Nikita A. Zhilyakov
Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8142-5507

Elena G. Dotsenko
Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7167-3865

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 02.05.2024; date of publication: 24.06.2024

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