The Death of Joan Vollmer and Decoding William S. Burroughs’ Work
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216224%3A14640%2F19%3A00113147" target="_blank" >RIV/00216224:14640/19:00113147 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="http://colloquium2019.upol.cz/" target="_blank" >http://colloquium2019.upol.cz/</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
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Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
The Death of Joan Vollmer and Decoding William S. Burroughs’ Work
Original language description
When the writer William S. Burroughs suggested to his common-law wife Joan Vollmer that they do their William Tell act for their guests, little did he know that it would result in him accidentally killing Vollmer. While research undertaken in the last two decades shows that they performed this act on a regular basis, Burroughs vehemently denied ever performing the William Tell act with Vollmer for most of his life and even changed the story several times. Soon after Vollmer’s death, he started working on what eventually became Naked Lunch, a novel composed of semi-episodic stories directly resisting interpretation. This experimental aspect of his writing—resisting the process of signification—was further amplified by his cut-up method in subsequent novels. Together with his interest in linguistics, the occult, Mayan calendar, or Scientology, his writing is charged with a singular purpose—to break free from the control mechanisms affecting us, Burroughs believed, throughout our lives. Finding a method of regaining control is then one of the dominant themes of his writing, yet, as some of his later diary entries suggest, all of this had one unconscious motivation—finding a rational explanation for him fatally shooting Joan Vollmer.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
O - Miscellaneous
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
60206 - Specific literatures
Result continuities
Project
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Continuities
I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace
Others
Publication year
2019
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů