This chapter traces William Burroughs’ encounters with yagé (ayahuasca) as a critical inflection point in his literary development and spiritual imagination. Marcus Boon explores the 1950s Amazonian journeys that led to The Yage Letters (1963) and its expanded edition The Yage Letters Redux (2006), arguing that Burroughs’ experiences with the vine laid the groundwork for his later explorations of language as virus, the cut-up method, and his cosmological vision of control and resistance. Intertwining Cold War paranoia, psychedelic experimentation, and postcolonial critique, Boon situates yagé not as an outlier in Burroughs’ oeuvre but as a key to understanding its epistemological and aesthetic radicalism. The chapter maps Burroughs’ legacy in the broader literary and anthropological discourse on ayahuasca, showing how his early visions resonate with – and complicate – contemporary movements for psychedelic healing, spiritual tourism, and decolonial thought. Burroughs, Boon suggests, helped carry yagé out of the jungle and into a globalized discourse of language, healing, and power.

This chapter analyses the role played by coinage in the Achaemenid empire, exploring the dynamics of royal policy and iconography within the multifaceted political and economic within its imperial space. The vast Persian empire stretched from Mesopotamia and further east to the Aegean Sea. When the Persians captured the Lydian kingdom of Kroisos in 546, at first they took over his coinage in gold and silver, and later, from around 515, they produced distinctively Persian coinage of gold darics and silver sigloi, which had images of an archer, as a symbol of the Persian king. These were only for the western part of their empire, and even there they were not part of a fully coin-using economy. Their purposes were probably gift-giving and payments to mercenary soldiers. Other coinages continued to be made, in electrum, for example at Kyzikos, and especially in silver. A large variety of silver coinages were made at many cities in western Asia Minor and in Cyprus. Some were very small denominations, perhaps to facilitate daily market exchanges. The famous deposits of coins in the Apadana of Persepolis are analysed in detail, and the controversial puzzle of their selection is discussed.

The chapter likens William Burroughs’ symbiotic language ‘organism’ to linguist Noam Chomsky’s contemporaneous language ‘organ’, inferentially an encrypted sub-program in the developing genome. If Burroughs’ verbal symbiont implies a primeval merger at a genetic, or phylogenetic level, it also exhibits an uncanny “othering” of language, absent in Chomsky. Yet both thinkers contest the persistent, commonly held view that language is essentially communication – a vehicle or mechanism bearing a necessary relation to something outside of itself. Rather, both see it as radically inward facing. For Chomsky, language is a tool of thought; for Burroughs, a tool of thought control. Indeed, his word virus evinces an incipient model illustrating parallel forms of encrypted programming, as of an intellectual, psychological, or cybernetic order. The chapter also notes the significance and millennial fortunes of this suggestively Burroughsian paradigm in AI-regulated social media ecosystems, and its preservation in idioms in wide circulation today.

The use of corpora and corpus-based research to create pedagogical materials is still a relatively new development. This chapter begins by operationalizing the terms we use (e.g., authentic, corpus-based/informed/driven) and then surveys recent empirical studies using corpus-informed materials for English language teaching. In addition to surveying existing corpus-informed pedagogical materials, we present a case study that explores similarities and differences between traditional teaching materials and corpus-informed teaching materials. After a description of each of the textbooks we survey, we then compare how the passive is presented across these two types of materials. This is then expanded to look at exercise types and lexical and use information across these materials.In conclusion, we present areas for future research, such as the need for classroom-based research comparing the use of corpus and non-corpus-based materials, exploring the effectiveness of corpus materials for certain grammatical structures, and exploring the effectiveness of specialized corpora for specific contexts of language use.

In the spring of 1964, just before the opening of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, the French government made the exceptional decision to loan the Venus de Milo to Japan. Some 1,750,000 people were able to admire the famous statue in Tokyo and Kyoto, many of them only after waiting in line for hours. At the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, where it was displayed from May 21 until June 25, the average number of visitors reached 24,700 per day, a figure comparable to the daily number of admissions at the Louvre Museum. Only the Tutankhamun exhibition presented the following year, again in Tokyo and Kyoto, attracted larger crowds.1 What are we to make of the attraction that the Greco-Roman patrimony has exerted not only in Japan, but also, more recently, in Korea, China, and Singapore? From a European point of view, there is a great risk in seeing this interest as an homage to Western civilization, indeed as a recognition of its superiority. A kind of condescending self-satisfaction creeps in: “They admire us. That’s perfectly normal, of course. But don’t they see that they demean themselves by behaving in this manner? And all the more since they cannot understand.

So much patience for so little gain ... ” The embarrassment that is felt in the West at how much trouble other nations have gone to to appreciate the culture of antiquity is associated with a paradoxical sentiment, namely, that Greece is the place where the human mind achieved its fundamental liberty, but that this place belongs to “us.” The freedom that was first discovered in Greece points toward autonomy, but it is under copyright – as though the people of the West were to say, “Feel free to feel free, but don’t forget to pay the fees you owe us!”

This chapter examines the impact of corpus linguistics on lexicography, reporting on how the use of large corpora of authentic texts has revolutionized dictionary compilation and given rise to novel types of dictionaries. It describes the shift from crafting dictionary entries with the aid of manually curated citation slips to the utilization of corpora and corpus software in contemporary lexicographical practices. These include the analysis of word frequencies to assist in headword selection and the vocabulary of definitions, the identification of lexical collocations and syntactic patterns to show how words are used in context, and the selection of example sentences to illustrate typical usage. The chapter then provides practical examples of how lexicographers use corpus frequencies, collocations, and concordances. Finally, the chapter considers the future of corpus-based dictionaries in the light of recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), reporting on a study by Lew (2023) that compares entries from the corpus-driven COBUILD dictionary of English with entries generated by ChatGPT 3.5 in response to prompts engineered by an expert lexicographer. The chapter’s conclusion posits that although AI will inevitably shape the future of lexicography, corpora and expert human feedback remain essential for maintaining the integrity and reliability of lexical resources.

This chapter examines the cultural and philosophical affinities between William Burroughs and the punk movement of the 1970s–90s, beyond the familiar “godfather of punk” label. Guy Stevenson argues that Burroughs’ deeply anti-humanist, anti-romantic aesthetic resonated with punk’s rejection of 1960s idealism, particularly through shared interests in nihilism, satirical obscenity, and avant-garde techniques like the cut-up method. Tracing Burroughs’ influence on figures from Patti Smith and Iggy Pop to Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, the chapter highlights his centrality to punk’s fusion of art, fashion, and political provocation. Burroughs emerges as both a prophetic critic of the counterculture he helped launch and a creative touchstone for a later generation disillusioned with its perceived hypocrisies. Punk’s Situationist roots and media-savvy irony are shown to mirror Burroughs’ own experiments in language, identity, and control, positioning him as a crucial, if ambivalent, figure in the evolution of Anglo-American radical aesthetics.

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.

Affect makes us vulnerable to attention capture. William Burroughs explored the aesthetic functions of playing with and capturing attention through his comic routines, his writing and his performances. This chapter shows how the outrageousness of Burroughs’ routines and his iconic performances in “Chappaqua,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and “The Black Rider” break down defensiveness through laughter and expose the enablers and drivers of addiction, challenging us to rethink our vulnerabilities in the face of drugs, social institutions, and new forms of media. His comic routines and performances reveal the social drivers of addiction, such as the health system’s involvement in the opioid crisis and the War on Drugs’ investment in social control, and anticipate the capture and resale of attention leading to the contemporary “attention economy,” the profits of surveillance capitalism and engineered addiction to social media.

Monotonicity and positive correlations are two basic tools that, when available, greatly facilitate the study of an interacting particle system. After recalling (without proof) the basic properties of the stochastic order, it is shown how one can prove that a given system is monotone or has positive correlations. The lower and upper invariant laws of an interacting particle are introduced and studied, and it is shown how comparison results can be used to show that various functions of an interacting particle system are monotone or to transfer results from one system to another.