Criticism
While Naked Lunch was an initial shock to the literary community, Nova Express was considered the end of Burroughs's stylistic experiment and of the Nova Trilogy. The novel received more praise on its own, as it was often compared to the other books in the trilogy and Naked Lunch. Eric Mottram stated that although "Burroughs's repetitive narcotic and homoerotic fantasies become tedious in sections of his third novel ... it is from these obsessions that his most powerful work develops."
Reviewing the novel for a genre audience, Judith Merril compared Nova Express to "the surreality of certain dreams, or the intense fascination of a confusion of new impressions in real life."
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)