As a lifelong homosexual and sometime heroin addict born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914, Burroughs' formative experiences led him to focus in his work both on the repressive social control of sexuality, and on the direct metabolic control of the body associated with heroin. Burroughs' work, developing the American Libertarian tradition rather than any form of Anarchism, let alone revolutionary collectivism, maps a quest for physical and spiritual freedom from a range of repressive forces including, finally, death itself.

Contemporary materialist theory is converging with the study of material culture, as evidenced by increasing attention given to the book as a material object produced, circulated, and consumed as a commodity. It is, however,problematic to conceive of the book as a material object, since writing itself cannot be straightforwardly conceived as a material thing, as Derrida has shown. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive the book as a commodity, since the notion of the commodity is also problematically rooted in the notion of the material, as can be established by reference to Marx and Benjamin. To consider the materiality of the book we need in place an architext of the use of the terms matter and materiality in theoretical thought. These terms are central but elusive, even when they are consciously thematized, as they are, for example, in the work of Judith Butler. This elusiveness arises only partly because the distinction between Cartesian and Aristotelian matter is forgotten, but mainly because these terms are used in an approximate fashion by Marx, who is the principal source of this vocabulary in contemporary theory. We should treat the term matter with the same skepticism we employ when dealing with other idealist concepts, not as their preconceptual other and redemption.

Resume: This article summarizes the early career of Kievborn writer John Cournos, with emphasis on his exposure to the October Revolution and his treatment of its politics and literature, culminating in a long series of reviews of Russian literary periodicals for T. S. Eliot's journal, The Criterion . The purpose of this article is briefly to outline Cournos' background, his entry into the London literary world, and to concentrate mainly on his neglected work in bringing Soviet literary debates to English-language readers in the 1920s and 1930s. The general purpose of this research is to assess the cultural impact of the Russian Revolution on Modernism, especially in the 1920s. Cournos' reviews forg The Criterion , informed by his commitment to Russian letters, show that a detailed account of Soviet literary culture was available to an Anglo-American literary audience. The present work was supported by a Fellowship funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

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