ABSTRACT
TANNER’s chief value has been to situate Burroughs successfully in an influential survey of modern American fiction; in doing so, he was the first major critic to go beyond the approach of the 1960s, which treated Burroughs as an outraged voice of spiritual protest. Focusing on his 1960s’ language experiments, Tanner persuasively identifies Burroughs’ main field of action as the central theme of American fiction: the conflict between a dream of autonomy and a dread of conditioning and control. Tanner’s achievement is to interpret Burroughs’ writing alongside that of less anomolous novelists, such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer, without denaturing it.
