Scholarship
Cutting up the Archive: William Burroughs and the Composite Text
by Oliver Harris This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the 4th Annual Symposium on Textual Studies at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, Leicester, 25 May 2007. I'd like to start by saying how delighted I am to have been invited here today by Peter Shillingsburg and how honoured I am to be in present company. However, at the immediate risk of testing your hospitality, I want to read you a review of my latest publication -- this new edition of The Yage Letters by William Burroughs -- that begs the question as to [...]
Henry Miller and William Burroughs: An Overview
Also see Ian MacFadyen's insightful response to RealityStudio's overview: Henry Miller and William Burroughs: A Letter. After finishing with the summer job his father had negotiated for him at the St. Louis Post Dispatch, William S. Burroughs returned to Harvard in September 1935. It was his senior year. An English major, Burroughs had studied with the Shakespeare scholar George Kittredge and would retain throughout his life an ability to quote the bard from memory. However, he had been a diffident student. Biographer Ted Morgan describes Burroughs' attitude toward this final year of college: "Back at Harvard it was more [...]
Everything Lost, the Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs: The Inside Story
By Volume Editor, Oliver Harris Background: The Crying of Lot 22 Where it had been since 1953 and how it got into the hands of a private collector remain a mystery, but it surfaced in October 1999 as Lot 22 of Sotheby's "Allen Ginsberg and Friends" sale in New York. The small, black notebook with lined paper that had turned sepia over the past half-century, was bought, for an undisclosed sum, by Ohio State University's Rare Books and Manuscript Library. At Columbus they have built up an impressive archive of Burroughs papers over the years, going [...]
Burroughs Literary Archive
Catalogue Excerpt by Ken Lopez In March 2006 the New York Public Library purchased the William S. Burroughs Literary Archive from collectors Robert and Donna Jackson. This sale was brokered by Ken Lopez Bookseller, who put together an extremely nice catalogue describing the archive and situating its importance in the Burroughs corpus. For those who can't afford the limited edition A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, published in 1973 and costing hundreds of dollars on the rare book market, the Lopez catalogue gives an illustrated overview of materials that we all hope the New York [...]
Transitional Period vs Gongs of Violence
Two Burroughs Cut-Ups Compared A few months ago Professor Oliver Harris was kind enough to share with RealityStudio one of his working documents for Yage Redux. It is an incredible Microsoft Word palimpsest comparing Burroughs' various yage publications and manuscripts. RealityStudio couldn't publish it (for obvious copyright reasons), but we did add a few images of it to Jed Birmingham's review of Yage Redux. Here they are again: one, two, three. At about the same time, Patrick C. also happened to send RealityStudio a pile of xeroxes of weird and obscure Burroughs texts, [...]
¿Quien Es?
William S. Burroughs Revisited, Mexico City, 2006 Overview of International Burroughs Symposium By Jorge Cuevas Cid As announced by RealityStudio, a couple of weeks ago, Mexico City held the first international symposium on the work of William S. Burroughs at UNAM. It was an unprecedented event which I think was timely and desirable for all of Burroughs' fans; that is, on the one hand there had never been a gathering of international Burroughs scholars before, but on the other hand, due to the increasing production of Burroughs' critical bibliography it was practically inevitable and even foreseeable that sooner or [...]
"Giving Away the Basic American Rottenness"
William Burroughs' Naked Lunch as an Historical Document by A. D. Parkinson This extended essay was written for my BA in History at Bristol University. I hope to remodel and extend it into a PhD thesis on Naked Lunch, and so any comments or criticisms would be very valuable, and can be emailed to me at A.D.Parkinson@gmail.com. Thank you for taking the time to read my work. 01 Introduction 02 Consumption and Control 03 Science and Reason 04 Normality and Homosexuality 05 Concluding Remarks 06 Bibliography This study will show that [...]