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 revisits the legal and cultural legacy of Naked Lunch, tracing its trajectory from an outlaw text at the center of a landmark obscenity trial to a canonized modernist classic – and back again to contested status in the context of contemporary book bans. Loren Glass reflects on the enduring influence of the 1966 legal exoneration of Naked Lunch, arguing that its victory relied on disavowing the very queer and obscene qualities that characterize its content. Through comparisons to current legislative efforts Glass highlights the persistence of moral panic around sexual representation, particularly as it relates to LGBTQ identities. The chapter probes the paradoxes at the heart of literary freedom, including the right not to read, and considers Naked Lunch’s fraught place in classrooms today. Ultimately, it calls for re-situating Burroughs’ work on the margins, where its destabilizing, subversive power can be more fully acknowledged – and responsibly engaged.

This chapter reviews the dilation/model theory for a single contraction operator from four points of view: (i) the coordinate-free geometric picture, (ii) the Douglas model theory, (iii) the Schäffer model theory, and (iv) the Sz.-Nagy–Foias model theory. This chapter also presents certain canonical decomposition theorems for an isometry, a general contraction operator, and the isometric embedding involved in an isometric lifting of a general contraction operator.

This chapter begins with a historical introduction to the concept of keyness and the various methods that have been proposed to operationalize keyness in order to obtain keywords and, more recently, key features. It then gives an overview of the wide range of linguistic questions that have been addressed using these two methods, illustrating several of these areas through detailed discussions of published studies on topics such as gender differences, register variation, language ideologies, political debates, and literary stylistics. It then provides a summary of state-of-the-art methods for keyword or key feature analysis. We present a corpus-based study of the keywords that distinguish two UK newspapers – The Daily Mail and The Guardian – in their coverage of the Just Stop Oil movement, presenting keyword lists for two keyness methods: corpus frequency keyness and text dispersion keyness. We use this case study as a basis for discussing the strengths and limitations of different corpus-based methods for analyzing keywords. We conclude the chapter by commenting on areas for future research that will help us better understand and apply keyness methods.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ fraught engagement with queerness, colonialism, and nationalism across such key texts as Queer, The Yage Letters, Naked Lunch, and The Wild Boys. Drawing on Oliver Harris’ and Alex Wermer-Colan’s insights into Burroughs’ overidentification with imperial tropes, Carmody argues that Burroughs simultaneously critiques and reappropriates colonial discourse through a queer lens. Through grotesque, parodic routines, Burroughs exposes the libidinal underpinnings of American exceptionalism and neocolonialism. Carmody situates Burroughs’ postwar expatriate writing – especially in 1950s Tangier – as emblematic of a nostalgic yet radical vision for a postnational community, rooted in aesthetic freedom and sexual plurality. Highlighting the transformation from colonial critique to postcolonial fantasy, Carmody demonstrates how Burroughs reimagines the colony as a site of anarchic potential, rather than nationalist redemption. The chapter ultimately suggests that Burroughs’ literary project is less a political blueprint than an unstable, generative terrain where queer desire and imperial critique intersect.

At the opening of Chapter 2 I explained how the introduction and spread of coinage were a part of a new dynamism of the eastern Mediterranean world in the seventh and sixth centuries, and I posed the questions of the extent to which the invention and use of coinage were both encouraged by the changes that were taking place and in turn contributed to that dynamism. Attempts to explore those questions must be based on clear assessments of the nature of early coinage – what it was and what it was not. It is only on the basis of such assessments that interpretations of the potential impact of coinage on economic, social and cultural developments can rest. My aim here therefore is to summarise the characteristics of early coinage as they have emerged in the course of the book.

Corpus-based analyses of grammatical variation and use focus on two major goals: (1) accounting for the distributional patterns of grammatical features across texts and varieties (adopting a text-linguistic approach) and (2) accounting for the contextual factors that allow us to predict and understand the choice among related grammatical variants (adopting a variationist approach). The present chapter begins by describing the goals of each line of research, followed by an explanation of the differing methods required to achieve those goals. Major publications that have adopted each approach are described in more detail. Then, building on this background, the chapter presents a case study that employs both approaches. The text-linguistic analysis focuses on the extent to which different genitive features are used in different registers. And the variationist analysis focuses on the contextual factors that influence the choice among genitive variants (′s, of, and nouns as noun-phrase pre-modifiers).

The present chapter discusses the concept of register from a diachronic perspective. While our examples are mainly taken from English, the general points remain valid for historical corpus linguistics as a whole. An initial survey demonstrates the importance of the register factor in historical corpus linguistics. We discuss the choice between comparability and representativeness in corpus design as well as the challenges caused by the absence of some registers during part of the recorded history of a language and the dearth of texts from some registers that did exist. We also introduce ways in which the spoken interaction of the past can be approached via speech-related registers and the different insights that can be gained through studying single linguistic features as well as the co-occurrence of several features. After this survey, we provide a more detailed account of a case study where the register concept turned out to be of crucial importance as a determinant of language variation and change: not-contraction in nineteenth-century English. The chapter concludes with some remarks on envisaged future developments in the field.

This chapter examines the response of car manufacturers to market integration through the cases of BMW and VW. It finds despite their differences, these car companies embraced the opportunities afforded by the Single Market, contributed to the standardization discussed in Chapter 2 through their widespread supply and value chains, and mobilized their regional interest associations to mitigate the challenges of market integration by shaping regional policies in their favor. VW’s expansion was production oriented, and it paired its “volume and diversity” strategy with a Sloanian approach to managing its growing family of brands. Conversely, BMW’s internationalization was distribution oriented, and it took a “quality” approach to profit and relied on a highly-skilled work force and huge network of specialty suppliers. This contrast, and the debates that took place within regional BIAs, demonstrates how different automakers navigated the changing European business environment of the 1980s and 1990s.

The time evolution of an interacting particle system on the complete graph, in the limit as the system size tends to infinity, is described by a differential equation called the mean-field equation. It is explained how the analysis of mean-field equations can be used to find the mean-field phase diagram and critical exponents, which depending on the model may turn out to give a more or less reliable prediction of properties of truly spatial models. Metastability is also briefly discussed, as well as the mean-field voter model that is described by the Wright–Fisher stochastic differential equation.

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.

This chapter studies a certain strong notion of minimality of an Ando isometric lift. This was inspired by certain concrete examples where such a strong notion of minimality occurs. Various tractable characterizations are provided for a commuting contractive pair to have a strongly minimal Ando isometric lift. One of the characterizations is in terms of what we refer to as the fundamental-operator pair for a commuting contractive pair. Three distinct proofs are given for the existence of the fundamental-operator pair. An intrinsic relation is provided between the fundamental-operator pair and Ando tuples of a commuting contractive pair. The fundamental-operator pair plays a fundamental role in the development of the model theory for commuting contractive pairs in Chapter 9.

Despite being a writer who was celebrate for transcending the written word to work in multiple forms of media, Burroughs remains underrecognized for his contributions to the art of cinema, especially as a screenwriter. This chapter explores the history of Burroughs’ engagement with cinema, highlighting his neglected, and unrealized, screenplays from the late 1960s and 1970s. After exploring his 1960s collaborations with Antony Balch on the cut-up films, Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups, this chapter traces the arc of Burroughs’ screenwriting, from his earliest film treatment, “Twilights Last Gleamings,” his closet screenplay, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, his screen adaptation of his novel, The Wild Boys, and his screenplay, Blade Runner: A Movie. After situating these works within the changing field of American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s, this chapter considers Burroughs’ theoretical contributions to screenwriting in his lectures on the subject at the City College of New York and Naropa College in the mid-1970s. Through this overview of Burroughs’ screenwriting and thinking, this chapter argues that Burroughs’ remains neglected for offering a valuable vision of an alternate cinema at a crucial time in American culture and history.

This chapter contains an overview of William Burroughs’ collaborative work over the course of a half-decade career, including literary collaborations (with Kells Elvins, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and James Grauerholz) and interactions with filmmakers, musicians, and artists. The discussion is situated within the context of other literary collaborations, considerations of geography (who meets whom and where), mutual affinities that inspire and sustain joint projects, and contemporary theoretical work on authorship (e.g., Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari). In so doing, the chapter invites a reconsideration of notions of single authorship, and a fresh, expanded perspective on Burroughs’ oeuvre. Ultimately, the chapter reflects on the essential ingredients for successful collaborations, as well as various perils and challenges that accompany any collaborative endeavor.