Postmodernism and cold war military technology in the fiction of Don DeLillo and William S. Burroughs

This thesis explores Don DeLillo's and William S. Burroughs' ongoing fictional engagements with the intimacy between Cold War military technology and postmodern networked culture. These novelists respond from seemingly divergent perspectives to the social and historiographical uncertainty generated by networked militarization. For DeLillo, this takes the form of a neo-realist narrative reconsideration of history, designed to emphasise the effects of the Cold War unconscious propagated by the speed and dissemination of cultural data. Burroughs' response takes the form of a counter-assault designed to overthrow and replace the 'control machinery' operating through the military-technological information system.