Burroughs Unbound

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.

[F]or the general Burroughs/Beat enthusiast, the book is a welcome and valuable addition to the rapidly expanding number of studies placing Burroughs at the leading edge of contemporary literary, social and political theory., Burroughs Unbound gives a cross-section of current Burroughsian scholarship, extensively sourced and footnoted. The inclusion of the original archival materials and transcripts makes the volume of extra interest to Burroughs fans and researchers. Like Burroughs’s expansive and heterogenous published material, spreading out like a riotous and startling rhizome, is now mirrored by this expanding network of secondary scholarship, editorial commentary and publication of transcripts. This is both fitting and necessary and this volume takes a primary place in that profusion., 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!, 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., Serious scholarly engagement with William Burroughs’ writings couldn’t really begin until after his legendary, larger-than-life persona had relinquished the public stage it had dominated for decades. Burroughs Unbound now shows us that genuinely new approaches to those writings couldn’t really appear until a generation later, when the last major caches of his manuscripts and notes have finally been unsealed for critical exploration. The essays in this volume, by both well-known and emerging scholars, systematically illuminate those caches, in the process revealing more than anyone could ever have expected about Burroughs’ working methods and performance practices, his relationships with other artists, thinkers, and publishers, and the indisputable centrality of his concepts and project to this most disturbing of centuries.

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).