Unworlding in Nameless: The Negation of World-building

World-building has thrived as a new field for scholars interested in fantastic fiction since it allows for new insights into how imaginary worlds are actualized other than simply the formal devices that render fantastical worlds different from non-fantastical ones. However, there are things that cannot be told and there are things that should not be told — these are the reaches that much weird fiction likes to explore. In the vocabulary of world-building, we would say that readers are never given access to a fully coherent and consistent imaginary world. The process of Nameless is what I identify as the process of unworlding — when the imaginary world is filled with contradictions and impossibilities and break any attempt at constructing a system or structure

The Future of Extinction:William S. Burroughs’ The Western Lands

In this article, I draw on William S. Burroughs’ The Western Lands to think about what François Laruelle has termed a “generic humanity.” This generic humanity broadens and expands our ethical obligations towards those who have not yet been included in humanity. Burroughs’ emphasis in the novel on flattened time, magic, and death as transformation is used to show how we can make Mankind extinct from our way of thinking. Burroughs’ novel is thus an example of a “philo-fiction,” a work of literature that allows us to see the world differently