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 central chapter builds on Chapter 2 to give sufficient conditions for an interacting particle system to be uniquely defined by a Poisson point process called a graphical representation. The generator construction is also discussed. The basic construction result is applied to prove that interacting particle systems with sufficiently weak interactions are ergodic in the sense that they have a unique invariant law that is the long-time limit started from any initial state. The theory is demonstrated on a stochastic Ising model, leading to a proof that the magnetization is zero at sufficiently high temperatures.

This chapter reviews research on corpus-based approaches to regional and social dialect variation in the English language. The studies reviewed in this chapter focus primarily on lexical and grammatical variation across nation, gender, age, class, and region, in both spoken and written English, from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Notably, this review includes extensive discussion of recent research on computational sociolinguistics, an emerging interdisciplinary field that has primarily focused on the analysis of very large corpora of social media data. The second part of this chapter presents a case study to exemplify this new approach to the analysis of language variation and change, which maps variation in the use of profanities in American English for the first time based on a multibillion-word corpus of social media data. In addition to illustrating how a large-scale corpus-based approach allows for new research questions in dialectology to be pursued, it also identifies two clear regional patterns in the use of profanity online, reflecting well-established American cultural patterns, specifically related to ethnicity and population density.

Corporations act as entities addressing the world with a single face and voice, with the law resorting to metaphors such as “person” and “body” to present the group as an entity distinct from its members. Four historic models of group action, which can hybridize across time, can provide an added functional analysis: the “cathedral” built by self-regulating guilds and societies; the “factory” resting on division of labour and hierarchical organization; the “bazaar” of adjoining enterprises providing some level of market integration between traders; and the “commune” resting on personalized bonds and common purposes. All types are affected by coordination problems arising whenever members must take joint decisions or set up a deliberative system for forming judgements preparatory to taking decisions. While a group can be said to attain corporate status when it functions as a univocal entity owning its actions, in order to act effectively, the corporation must develop techniques to gather and process information attained by its agents, much of which will be predictions of the conduct of other agents. The corporation exists to cultivate and embody common knowledge. Preceding this chapter’s conceptual analysis is a case study of the historically important and now-troubled Boeing.

This chapter describes corpus-based work that analyses texts from a register perspective – that is, analyzing patterns of pervasive linguistic features and interpreting the communicative functions served by the features in the situational context. The chapter defines ‘register’, distinguishing it from ‘genre’. It then reviews research, covering studies of different linguistic scope (individual features, discourse systems, patterns of co-occurring features) and different purposes with respect to registers (e.g., describing a single register vs. comparing registers), as well as studies about the nature of situational characteristics. Example studies illustrate a variety of approaches while also covering seminal work. The chapter includes a section focused on English for specific purposes (ESP) since register variation is central to that field. Pulling together the research, the chapter summarizes accomplishments and challenges for register studies thus far. Accomplishments include establishing the importance of register variation and continually advancing research methods to better understand it. Challenges include the struggle to impact related fields, especially education and other areas of linguistics. The final section describes a sample study focused on engineering writing that is typical of register research in many ways but also incorporates interview data to illustrate how corpus results can be made more meaningful for educational applications.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ equivocal position within the American literary canon, examining both the institutional challenges to his inclusion and the theoretical strategies scholars have used to argue for his legitimacy. Sean Bolton traces critical attempts to align Burroughs with modernism, postmodernism, and even a proposed “amodernist” tradition, while also acknowledging the persistent difficulty of assimilating his work into stable frameworks of interpretation. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s aesthetics of canonicity, poststructuralist theory, and his own concept of “narrative revolution,” Bolton contends that Burroughs’ formal innovations – particularly the cut-up method and fragmented subjectivities – both exemplify and exceed existing literary categories. Ultimately, the chapter questions whether Burroughs needs the canon at all, suggesting that his enduring cultural influence may rest precisely on his resistance to assimilation. For readers and scholars alike, Burroughs remains an outsider by design, a figure whose work continues to provoke, disturb, and inspire on its own uncompromising terms.

This chapter discusses how corpus stylistics relates to other fields in terms of methodologies and explanatory purposes. It proposes a specific take on corpus stylistics, which makes it possible to both focus on meanings in individual texts and identify features that are shared across texts. This approach brings considerations of register and style together, and it has clear relevance to literary scholarship. To illustrate this kind of corpus stylistics, the chapter presents Mahlberg (2013) as a case study on patterns of characterization in works by Charles Dickens. Mahlberg (2013) addresses the following question: In a corpus of texts by Dickens, can textual patterns be identified that have discernible functions in the creation of fictional worlds? The study uses the concept of local textual functions to combine corpus linguistic and literary perspectives in the analysis of n-grams, and it proposes a novel approach to characterization in Dickens. What this case study illustrates for corpus stylistics more widely is how the application of relative basic corpus linguistic methods can support the creation of a coherent theoretical approach to explain meanings in texts.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ lifelong obsession with disease – particularly cancer and viruses – as a central metaphor in his critique of power, control, and modernity. Polina Mackay and James Mackay argue that Burroughs’ engagement with medicine, from his early syphilis diagnosis to his interest in Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox theories, shaped his representation of illness as both literal and ideological contagion. From Junky to Naked Lunch, the cut-up texts, and Blade Runner: A Movie, Burroughs portrays medical institutions and bureaucracies not as healing forces but as agents of repression, manipulation, and decay. The chapter shows how Burroughs’ writing fuses Reichian thought, alternative medicine, and paranoid systems theory into a distinctive epidemiology of language, addiction, and social control. While his metaphoric conflation of disease and power reveals the limits of postwar biopolitics, it also risks collapsing critical inquiry into conspiracy. Ultimately, Burroughs’ viral imagination oscillates between incisive cultural diagnosis and reactionary anxiety, offering a vision of medicine as both metaphor and battleground.

This article contextualizes the work of William Burroughs in terms of twentieth-century avant-garde movements, particularly Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, and Situationism, arguing that he was deeply influenced by them and also made significant and hugely influential contributions to their aesthetic and political projects. It situates his early work with the beats as markedly Surrealist, and it argues that Naked Lunch is a Surrealist masterpiece. It traces Burroughs’ movement into 1960s multimedia cut-ups, image-text, film, and audio experiments in relation to Guy Debord and Situationism. The article concludes by noting that we should be cautious in how optimistically we read some of this work, particularly in light of the many ways the twentieth-century avant-gardes failed to realize their revolutionary hopes and how our current experience with a fully-networked world that uses many avant-garde techniques and ideas often leads not to a utopian revolution but instead a morass of reactionary post-truth politics.

Language use in online contexts has become an area of increasing academicinterest, especially for corpus linguistics (Crosthwaite et al., 2023). This chapter details the trends across previous corpus studies of online language, outlining some of the most important studies driving these trends and critically discussing the methodologies they use. Finally, we present a case study demonstrating some of these state-of-the-art techniques and trends. In this case study, we explore the discourses of stem-cell research across texts from websites known to promote pseudoscience and conspiracy.