Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Professor S. E. Gontarski (Florida State University, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic USA
Dimensions:   Width: 15.80cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 23.20cm
Weight:   0.780kg
ISBN:  

9781501362187

ISBN 10:   1501362186
Pages:   456
Publication Date:   16 December 2021
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

"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"

Reviews

Most think that when a book is published it is complete. But what happens if this formula is reversed? Burroughs's genius may very well be discovering that the future of the book is the archive-a vast expansive of materials that are in continuous flux. Burroughs Unbound makes the case that in the archival remains of this American master is the key to unlocking an aesthetic that will dominate the arts for next one-hundred years. Gontarski's collection of essays is as exciting as it is prophetic! * Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Professor of English and Philosophy, University of Houston-Victoria, USA *

Most think that when a book is published it is complete. But what happens if this formula is reversed? Burroughs's genius may very well be discovering that the future of the book is the archive-a vast expansive of materials that are in continuous flux. Burroughs Unbound makes the case that in the archival remains of this American master is the key to unlocking an aesthetic that will dominate the arts for next one-hundred years. Gontarski's collection of essays is as exciting as it is prophetic! * Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Professor of English and Philosophy, University of Houston-Victoria, USA * The last two decades have shown a tremendous growth in academic interest in the work of William S. Burroughs. No longer a fringe phenomenon, the Beat Generation, and it's leading proponents, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, are fully accepted as a well-defined literary movement alongside the Bloomsbury Group and the Lost Generation and possibly as the first home-grown one. The rapid development of scholarship in this area, and of Burroughs studies in particular, is extraordinary as is shown by this thought-provoking, sometimes ground-breaking, set of analytical and investigative essays by the World's leading authorities on Burroughs. It is fascinating to read so many different takes and approaches to Burroughs' work. There is deep intelligence at work here. I find some of the ideas inspiring, others are challenging, some thought-provoking and some I disagree with, which is how it should be. * Barry Miles, author of Call Me Burroughs *

Author Information

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).

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