This chapter repositions William Burroughs as a radical environmental thinker whose apocalyptic visions and experimental prose provide an oblique but vital contribution to ecocriticism. Steen Ledet Christiansen argues that Burroughs’ work – particularly Naked Lunch, The Exterminator, and the Nova trilogy – challenges the limits of environmental representation through stylistic rupture, linguistic sabotage, and the dissolution of the human subject. Burroughs’ toxic narrative landscapes, cut-up methods, and critique of linguistic determinism reveal the entanglement of language, ideology, and environmental degradation. Far from a conventional ecological writer, Burroughs destabilizes anthropocentric frameworks and anticipates posthumanist theories by framing language itself as a viral, controlling force. His fractured narratives expose the environmental imagination to new modes of seeing and being, making him an unlikely but essential figure in rethinking literature’s role in the Anthropocene.

Timothy S. Murphy explores William Burroughs’ oeuvre as a “singularity” in three overlapping senses: aesthetic uniqueness, philosophical resistance to generalization, and cosmological metaphor. Burroughs’ cut-up novels – Naked Lunch, The Nova Trilogy, and beyond – embody a form of narrative experimentation that resists categorization and disrupts conventional literary logic. Drawing on concepts from astrophysics, Murphy aligns Burroughs’ work with the disruptive force of black holes, novae, and supernovae. Through a close reading of the trilogy’s stellar metaphors, especially the figure of Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, Murphy argues that Burroughs anticipates a model of narrative that is both destructive and generative – annihilating fixed identities and control structures while offering the possibility of linguistic and ontological renewal. The “Burroughs singularity,” codenamed WSB X-1, represents a continual feedback loop between collapse and creation, producing texts as unstable, irradiated, and transformative as the cosmic phenomena they metaphorically invoke.

The brief conclusion summarises the book’s argument about Blake in relation to the critical terms of humanism and posthumanism. It argues that Blake’s nuanced representation of the body, which, in his universe, is simultaneously preformed and self-organised, aligns him with a distinctly Romantic humanism while also allowing him to anticipate the insights of posthumanism. Finally, it suggests that Blake’s works offer the concept of elasticity as an alternative to plasticity – a concept which acknowledges the complexities of embodiment while insisting on the importance of resilience and identity.

Roessler and Steeves, in their introduction, underscore the urgency of the debate about being human in an increasingly digitalized society. In a further step, they outline the theoretical background with regard to the concept of a human being, as well as with regard to the theoretical approaches of postmodernism and transhumanism, to situate the volume within earlier discussions about the digital human. They conclude with a helpful overview of the volume’s contributions.

This chapter synthesises the findings and discusses how sociomaterial processes shape languages. Challenging modernist linguistic paradigms, it examines how language categories emerge through diverse cultural, historical, and material practices. The chapter critiques binary linguistic models and universalist, teleological assumptions of standardisation, showing that stable linguistic systems are not ‘natural’, but result from specific sociopolitical and material conditions. In contrast, fluid linguistic practices in postcolonial and globalised contexts exhibit variability, innovation, and complex indexicality. Belize’s multilingual environment exemplifies a setting without a hegemonic linguistic centre, producing liquid linguistic norms. The chapter argues for decolonial approaches to linguistics that embrace heterogeneity and that challenge exclusionary, Eurocentric models. Ultimately, it positions fluid linguistic practices as a cultural avant-garde and understands postcolonial environments as inspiring insights into future global sociolinguistic orders shaped by digitalisation and transnationalism.

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of UX writing as a contemporary domain of elite language work. I first discuss existing literature on UX writing, showing that while scholars have discussed at large how users interact with digital media, there is considerably less work on how language is used by producers. After this brief survey, I offer an in-depth introduction to UX writing in three parts. First, I provide a broad mapping of the profession, where I discuss the history and origins of UX writing. Next, I give an introduction to UX writers’ language work, illustrating how their work is both centrally concerned with writing interface texts and much more complex than that. Finally, I turn to some initial ethnographic observations about UX writers’ concrete text production. In this last regard, I am particularly interested in how UX writers mobilize (meta)linguistic knowledge in their work, arguing that they are not just language workers but also language experts. Overall, the chapter thus offers a first description of the work and profession of UX writers, orienting primarily to these wordsmiths’ own views and understandings of what it is that they do.

This final, concluding chapter of the book offers a reflection on what the production of digital media reveals about the cultural politics of these technologies. Drawing together the threads developed in the previous chapters, and especially UX writers’ own theorizations of language, I discuss the normative dimensions of interface design and make the case for a posthumanist approach to language in digital media interfaces. My central argument is simple: regardless of how people choose to use digital media, the software itself always posits an ideal way of using it – it entails an inbuilt ideal users have to respond to, even if that response is to contest the norm the software produces. In this way, focusing on the production of interface texts provides a valuable perspective on the broader cultural politics of digital media by theorizing UX writers, software, and users as part of a complex sociotechnical assemblage rather than as individual, disconnected agents.

This chapter offers an introduction to UX writing and to the theoretical framing of the book. First, I outline my understanding of digital media as cultural-political artefacts, drawing attention to the fact that digital media are not neutral but inscribed with particular norms and identities. I establish this position by reviewing literature from digital discourse studies, media and communication studies, cultural studies of technology, as well as posthumanism, placing particular emphasis on software interfaces as designed sites where power is exercised. This brings me to the second part of my theoretical framing: how language is taken up as a resource in the design of software interfaces. In this regard, I orient to critical sociolinguistic scholarship on language work. I briefly outline my position in this field, aligning with scholarship that orients to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of capital and the linguistic marketplace. Additionally, I reflect on the status of UX writers as elite language workers or wordsmiths and how such (more) privileged language work hinges on its behind-the-scenes nature while nonetheless being instrumental in shaping social norms and values.

Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) narrates two scenes of panther attacks. In the first scene, Huntly’s mind is paralyzed, while in the second, Huntly’s body kills a stalking panther by hurling a tomahawk across a dark cave, an effort stemming from our bodily “constitution.” This introduction argues that this artist not only troubled the mind-centered ontology of consciousness—the Cartesian idea of the mind’s dominance over the body—but also explored the ontological alternatives that centered the expressions of our material body’s “constitution.” It both uncovers the posthumanist accents of this work, and reveals the way it prods us to refurbish posthumanism by historicizing it. Starting with Brown, this introduction thus recovers a set of texts focused on “minding the body,” on not simply eroding the philosophical distinction between the mind and body in order to trouble a mind-centered ontology and imagine a body-centered alternative to it, as posthumanism does. It also reveals the way artists used the expressive agency of these historical bodies to imagine less repressive alternatives to nineteenth-century structures of power—including chattel slavery, market capitalism, and patriarchy—whose claims to dominance involved reducing the body to little more than mindless matter.