William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century is the definitive book on Burroughs' overarching cut-up project and its relevance to the American twentieth century. Burroughs's Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded) remains the best-known of his textual cut-up creations, but he committed more than a decade of his life to searching out multimedia for use in works of collage. By cutting up, folding in, and splicing together newspapers, magazines, letters, book reviews, classical literature, audio recordings, photographs, and films, Burroughs created an eclectic and wide-ranging countercultural archive. This collection includes previously unpublished work by Burroughs such as cut-ups of work written by his son, cut-ups of critical responses to his own work, collages on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, excerpts from his dream journals, and some of the few diary entries that Burroughs wrote about his wife, Joan. William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century also features original essays, interviews, and discussions by established Burroughs scholars, respected artists, and people who encountered Burroughs. The essays consider Burroughs from a range of starting points-literary studies, media studies, popular culture, gender studies, post-colonialism, history, and geography. Ultimately, the collection situates Burroughs as a central artist and thinker of his time and considers his insights on political and social problems that have become even more dire in ours.
Joan Hawkins is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University. She is author of Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde and editor of the anthology Downtown Film and TV Culture, 1975-2001. She co-organized the Burroughs Century conference and symposium held at Indiana University Bloomington in 2014. Alex Wermer-Colan is a Council of Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow at Temple Universitys Digital Scholarship Center. He researched and edited The Travel Agency is on Fire, a collection of unpublished archival materials, prose poems Burroughs produced by cutting up a range of canonical texts. Wermer-Colan was the organizer of the William S. Burroughs Centennial Conference held at the City University of New York in 2014.
Acknowledgments Collage of Time Harvard Lampoon Parody, William S. Burroughs, facsimile, 1965 Introduction: Cutting Up the Century / Alex Wermer-Colan and Joan Hawkins Biographical Timeline Metamorphosis 1. Cutting Up the Century / Oliver Harris The Reality Studio SECTION I: ICON/VIRAL Deposition of the Ugly Spirit, William S. Burroughs, typescript, Villa Muniria, Summer 1961 2. Burroughs and Biography: An Interview with Barry Miles / Oliver Harris Cutting Up the Critics, typescripts, 1962-64 3. The Nova Convention: Celebrating the Burroughs of Downtown New York / Kristen Galvin Nova Convention Poster, Sylvere Lotringer, facsimile, 1978 4. The Disembodied Fry: William S. Burroughs and Vocal Performance / Landon Palmer Cut-up with Limericks, William S. Burroughs, typescript, 1971 5. William S. Burroughs' Spirit of Collaboration / Allen Hibbard SECTION II: SPACE/TIME 6. Burroughs and the Biosphere, 1974-1997 / Kathelin Gray The Permissive Society, William S. Burroughs, typescript, 1971 7. Beat Regionalism: Burroughs in Mexico, Burroughs in Women's Studies / Aaron Nyerges Collage of Newsclippings, William S. Burroughs, facsimile, 1970 8. Interference Zones: William Burroughs in the Interstices of Globalization / Timothy S. Murphy On China 9. Cut-Up City: William S. Burroughs' "St. Louis Return" / Eric Sandweiss SECTION III: WORD/IMAGE On Addiction 10. William S. Burroughs' Imperial Decadence: Subversive Literature in the Cynical Age of the American Century / Alex Wermer-Colan Opium Collage, William S. Burroughs, typescript, Dream Rat Calendar, Monday Bellevue 4, 1970 11. Naked Lunch and the Art of Incompleteness: The Use of Genre in Burroughs' Book and Cronenberg's Film / Joshua Vasquez The Fall of Art 12. Queer Outlaws Losing: The Betrayal of the Outlaw Underground in The Place of Dead Roads / Kurt Hemmer Thinking in Colors 13. Rimbaud and Genet, Burroughs' Favorite Mirrors / Veronique Lane SECTION IV: CUT/FOLD On the Cut-Up 14. Cross the Wounded Galaxies: A Conversation about the Cut-Up Trilogy / Davis Schneiderman and Oliver Harris The Photo Collage: Watergate 15. "Word FallingPhoto Falling": William S. Burroughs and the Word as Written Image / Blake Stricklin Cutting Up Scientology 16. Mutable Forms: The Proto-Ecology of William Burroughs' Early Cut-Ups / Chad Weidner SECTION V: BODY/SPIRIT The Wild Boys, A Pornographic Screenplay 17. William S. Burroughs, Transcendence Porn, and The Ticket That Exploded / Katharine Streip Dream Note on Indictment for Murdering Joan, William S. Burroughs 18. Gender Trouble: A Critical Roundtable on Burroughs and Gender / Ann Douglas, Anne Waldman, and Regina Weinreich Cutting Up Last Words 19. The Burroughs Effect / Anne Waldman Root Face, William S. Burroughs, facsimile, 1987 Index
"Cutting up the Century is the book that scholars and enthusiasts of Burroughs' avant-garde practices have been waiting for."-Douglas Field, author of All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin "A landmark in scholarship. . . . Highly recommended."-Choice
