This seminar proposes  to examine William S. Burroughs as a problem. To achieve this goal, we invite provocative papers grounded in comparative methodologies and attentive to less-transited texts, episodes, affiliations, and cultural encounters. Rather than asking what Burroughs “was,” we want to ask what his work does. We need to pause and think about  the categories through which we attempt to understand his ouvre—and what those categories conceal.

What notions of authorship, originality, literary value, sexuality, politics, nationality, identity, language, media, knowledge, or artistic production did Burroughs put under pressure? What happens when his writing is read alongside figures, traditions, media, or intellectual histories with which it is not usually associated? Can Burroughs's experiments still unsettle us? What about his political views?

We are interested in archival work, but not simply in the recovery of origins or the reconstruction of authorial intention. Archives may instead be approached as contested sites of selection, mediation, myth-making, and afterlife. Similarly, we welcome work on familiar Burroughsian techniques—cut-up, collage, montage, sampling, recording—but especially when these are placed in unexpected comparative contexts. Again, what do these techniques do, how are they being used today, and by whom?

We also invite papers willing to be unfriendly to their subject. Is Burroughs overrated? Is he politically embarrassing, historically compromised, or aesthetically exhausted? Is he already cancelled—or has “cancellation” itself become another way of making cultural icons safe? Can Burroughs be restored, and if so, to what? Or is he damaged beyond repair? What might be gained by taking seriously the possibility that some of his work should be rejected, rather than rescued?

Possible approaches include, but are not limited to:

-Burroughs and writers, artists, or intellectual traditions with which he is rarely compared 
-Burroughs and competing theories of authorship, originality, and literary value
-Archives, censorship, canonization, and the production of literary authority
-Burroughs and the politics of race, gender, sexuality, class, empire, and nationality
-Burroughs's relationship to religion, esotericism, anthropology, science, medicine, or alternative epistemologies
-Literary and non-literary media: sound, film, photography, visual art, performance, television, and digital culture
-Adaptation, appropriation, influence, imitation, and misreading
-Critical reception, including hostile, skeptical, or revisionist readings

We especially welcome proposals that are comparative in more than name: papers that put Burroughs into genuine friction with another author, tradition, medium, language, archive, or conceptual framework. We are less interested in proving that Burroughs anticipated everything than in discovering where he fails, contradicts himself, becomes strange, becomes ordinary, or becomes impossible to classify.