Burroughs Unbound: William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing

Description

In addition to contributing significantly to the growing field of Burroughs scholarship, Burroughs Unbound also directly engages with the growing fields of textual studies, archival research, and genetic criticism, asking crucial questions thereby about the nature of archives and their relationship to a writer's work. These questions about the archive concern not only the literary medium. In the 1960s and 1970s Burroughs collaborated with filmmakers, sound technicians, and musicians, who helped re-contextualized his writings in other media. Burroughs Unbound examines these collaborations and explores how such multiple authorship complicates the authority of the archive as a final or complete repository of an author's work. It takes Burroughs seriously as a radical theorist and practitioner who critiqued drug laws, sexual practice, censorship, and what we today call a society of control. More broadly, his work continues to challenge our common assumptions about language, authorship, textual stability, and the archive in its broadest definition. Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Burroughs Unbound: An Atrophied Introduction • S. E. Gontarski Part I: Theory 1 Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism: Cut-ups, Playbacks, Pick-ups, and the “Limits of Control” from Burroughs to Deleuze • S. E. Gontarski 2 Pay It All Back: Paranoid Writing/Writing Paranoia • Nathan Moore 3 The Tension of Possibility: Reading Closure in Ah Pook is Here through the Multiframe • Ash Connell-Gonzalez 4 Fluidity and Fixity in William S. Burroughs’ Writing: The Text Will Not Hold • Allen Hibbard Part II: Texts 5 Making Dead Fingers Talk • Oliver Harris 6 *Whale Drek: The Lost Footnotes of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch • Jed Birmingham 7 “There Are No Typographical Errors in This Edition”: Burroughs’ Textual Infection of the New York School • Nick Sturm 8 “I Spent Months in the Morgue”: William S. Burroughs’ Appropriation of Time Magazine • Tomasz Stompor 9 Digitizing the Word Hoard: Remediating Countercultural Archives after the American Century • Alex Wermer-Colan 10 Mess, Taste, and Gastronomic Criticism: Digesting Naked Lunch • Rona Cran Part III: Performance 11 Performance in the Work of William S. Burroughs • John M. Bennett 12 Burroughs, Bowie, and the Reshaping of the Counterculture: William S. Burroughs Meets “Ziggy Stardust” • Barry J. Faulk 13 All the News Not Fit to Print • Blake Stricklin Appendix A: Evergreen on the Air: Barney Rosset on Censorship and Publishing Naked Lunch Appendix B: Lectures on the Virus, May 3–8, 1974, Burroughs Archive at Ohio State University Appendix C: Burroughs Manifest, Burroughs Archive at Florida State University, September 12, 1980, purchase Appendix D: Supplemental Bucher Burroughs Purchases, December 12, 1990 Appendix E: Burroughs and Bucher, Correspondence and Notes 1978–9, 1984 Appendix F: “A 30-Year Wait. A 16-Mile Journey.” The Story of the “Lost” Burroughs Archive at Florida State University List of Contributors Index