The Dark Ecology of Naked Lunch
Department of English, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840, USA
Humanities 2020, 9(4), 130; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9040130
Received: 15 September 2020
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Revised: 22 October 2020
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Accepted: 22 October 2020
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Published: 30 October 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Keep on Rolling Under the Stars: Green Readings on the Beat Generation)
In this article, I argue that William S. Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch engages in a “perverse aesthetics” that is analogous to Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology. The novel’s main themes of consumption and control are directly related to the Anthropocene’s twin disasters of global warming and mass extinction, and the trope for addiction, junk, reveals Burroughs’ deep analysis of the political and social forces that attempt to control life, what Burroughs calls biocontrol. By placing the novel’s obsession with hanging/lynching in the context of dark ecology, its critique of racism can also be seen as a critique of speciesism.
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Keywords:
William S. Burroughs; Naked Lunch; dark ecology; consumption; control; Timothy Morton; speciesism; consumerism; mass extinction
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Hart, G. The Dark Ecology of Naked Lunch. Humanities 2020, 9, 130. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9040130
AMA Style
Hart G. The Dark Ecology of Naked Lunch. Humanities. 2020; 9(4):130. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9040130
Chicago/Turabian StyleHart, George. 2020. "The Dark Ecology of Naked Lunch" Humanities 9, no. 4: 130. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9040130
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