Burroughs Unbound

S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. He is the author or editor of 29 books and, with Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison, he is series editor of the Bloomsbury series, Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism. The serie editors were also volume editors for the initial books in that series: Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the follow-up, Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2014). Gontarski’s recent books are: Beckett’s “Happy Day”: A Manuscript Study (2017) and Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Burroughs Unbound: An Atrophied Introduction
S. E. Gontarski, Florida State University, USA

Part 1: Theory

1. Weaponized Aesthetics and Dystopian Modernism: Cut-ups, Playbacks, Pick-ups and the “Limits of Control” from Burroughs to Deleuze
S. E. Gontarski, Florida State University, USA

2. Pay It All Back: Writing Paranoia-Paranoid Writing
Nathan Moore, School of Law, Birkbeck College, London, UK

3. The Tension of Possibility: Reading Closure in Ah Pook through the Sum of the Multiframe
Ash Connell-Gonzalez, University of Oregon, USA

4. Fluidity and Fixity in William S. Burroughs’ Writing
Allen Hibbard, Middle Tennessee State University, USA

Part 2: Texts

5. Making Dead Fingers Talk
Oliver Harris, Keele University, UK

6. *Whale Drek: The Lost Footnotes of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch
Jed Birmingham, Contributing Editor, Reality Studio

7. "There are no typographical errors in this edition": Burroughs's Textual Infection of the New York School
Nick Sturm, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

8. “I spent months in the morgue”: William S. Burroughs’ appropriation of TIME magazine
Tomasz Stompor, Göttingen State and University Library, Germany

9. Digitizing the Word Hoard: Remediating Counter-Cultural Archives after the American Century
Alex Wermer-Colan, Temple University (Digital Scholarship Center), USA

10. Mess, Taste, and Gastric Criticism: Digesting Naked Lunch
Rona Cran, University of Birmingham, UK

Part 3: Performance

11. Performance in the Work of William S. Burroughs
John M. Bennett, The Ohio State University, USA

12. Burroughs, Bowie, and the Reshaping of the Counterculture
Barry Faulk, Florida State University, USA

13. The Alternative Press is News
Blake Stricklin, University of Houston, Victoria, USA

Appendix A: Evergreen on the Air: Barney Rosset on Censorship and Publishing Naked Lunch [Transcript of 1962, WNYC radio broadcast], Barney Rosset, Publisher, Grove Press, 1951-1986

Appendix B: “Lectures on the Virus,” selections from Burroughs’s lectures at CCNY, 1974

Appendix C: Burroughs Manifest, the “lost, found and lost again” Burroughs Archive at Florida State University, 12 September 1980 purchase

Appendix D: Supplemental Bucher purchases, 12 December, 1990

Appendix E: Burroughs and Bucher, letters 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

Index