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.

This chapter reevaluates William Burroughs’ cut-up fictions through the lens of repetition, textual variation, and the limits of intertextual theory. Benoît Delaune argues that Burroughs’ compositional method – especially in The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express – exceeds traditional literary frameworks such as Kristeva’s intertextuality or Genette’s transtextuality. Drawing on the restored editions of Burroughs’ work and early collaborations like Minutes to Go, the chapter shows how Burroughs employed chance procedures alongside careful editorial strategy to create complex recursive networks of affective resonance. Rather than merely remixing texts, Burroughs generated a form of material autotextuality that destabilizes meaning, challenges linear reading, and undermines authorial intention. Through comparisons to avant-garde practices in music and poetry, Delaune situates Burroughs’ writing as a radical alternative to literary production – a practice that treats language as sensory and viral, foregrounding affect, repetition, and disruption over interpretation or reference.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ lifelong preoccupation with time as a philosophical and compositional problem, tracing its evolution from early influences such as Oswald Spengler to the yagé-induced revelations of “space-time travel” and the radical temporality of the cut-up method. Tomasz Stompor argues that Burroughs’ literary experiments – from epistolary montage to newspaper-formatted layouts – challenge the linear, regulated time of modernity and propose alternative, nonlinear temporal regimes. Drawing on the Composite City vision from The Yage Letters, Spenglerian cyclical history, and Burroughs’ self-constructed calendar inspired by Mayan systems, the chapter demonstrates how Burroughs’ formal innovations enact temporal disruption. Through analysis of his cut-up trilogy, contributions to little magazines like My Own Mag, and the spatial logic of montage, Stompor positions Burroughs as a literary time-traveler whose work seeks to liberate the reader from linguistic and chronological control.

This chapter interrogates William Burroughs’ construction of queer masculinity across his life and work, tracing how trauma, sexual repression, and homophobic cultural conditioning shaped his macho queer persona and his artistic output. Ian MacFadyen analyzes The Wild Boys and Port of Saints as exuberant departures from earlier narratives of abjection, projecting a militant, erotic utopia of all-boy societies free from female influence. Through Burroughs’ letters, routines, and cut-up techniques, the chapter tracks the evolution of a self-sustaining erotic textual system – simultaneously revealing and concealing the vulnerability that underpinned his hostility and misogyny. MacFadyen contrasts Burroughs’ rejection of effeminacy with his fascination for sexual fluidity, exploring the cultural contradictions of queer identity in the mid twentieth century. Through close readings, the chapter considers Burroughs’ boy fantasies as both a symptom of and response to social trauma, while critically assessing his lasting legacy – and limitations – as a radical figure of queer cultural disruption.

This chapter examines William Burroughs’ complex relationship to paranoia and conspiracy thinking, tracing how these motifs function not merely as ideological content but as structuring principles of his literary imagination. Chris Fleming argues that Burroughs’ work defies categorization as straightforward “conspiracy theory” and instead constructs a worldview where causality is overdetermined by magical cosmology, genre logics, and a suspicion of all systems. From Naked Lunch to Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs explores power through occult forces, viral metaphors, and political subterfuge, yet his narratives ultimately resist resolution and totalizing explanatory schemes. Fleming contrasts Burroughs’ conspiratorial aesthetics with the “paranoid style” of the political right, including modern manifestations like QAnon, showing how Burroughs anticipates and subverts these frameworks through irony, ambivalence, and formal disruption. Rather than reducing Burroughs to “problematic” status, the chapter insists on reading his paranoia as artistically generative and epistemologically destabilizing – a provocation to critics and ideologues alike.

This chapter examines William Burroughs’s cut-up method, proposing that cut-ups serve not only as experimental literary techniques but as phenomenological representations of embodied perception. While cut-ups have often been viewed as avant-garde critiques of language and control, this study repositions them as cognitive tools that model how thought, memory, and sensory experience operate in fragmented, situated, and relational ways. Drawing on enactivist theories of mind and cognitive narratology, the chapter argues that Burroughs’s cut-ups enact mental processes rather than merely represent them. Situating cut-ups within the wider context of twentieth-century media shifts, montage aesthetics, and artistic experimentation, the chapter connects Burroughs’s work to both literary and visual practices. A close reading of BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS demonstrates how cut-ups transform reading into an embodied, participatory process, offering new insight into Burroughs’s engagement with perception, subjectivity, and a process-based poetics.

This chapter positions William Burroughs within the radical tradition of avant-garde manifesto writing, arguing that his cut-up experiments, pamphlets, tape texts, and prose manifestos from the late 1950s through the early 1970s exemplify the genre’s urgency, performativity, and call to action. Drawing on the lineage of Marx, Futurism, and Dada, Jimmy Fazzino explores how Burroughs weaponized language and media to dismantle structures of “Control” through techniques of textual sabotage and sonic disruption. Works like Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, and The Revised Boy Scout Manual are read not only as aesthetic provocations but as revolutionary acts aligned with the manifesto’s historical function. Addressing Burroughs’s contradictions – including the inflammatory rhetoric of his guerrilla texts – Fazzino examines how Burroughs redefined literature as a site of resistance, merging art and life in a performative praxis designed to make things happen.