William Burroughs, The Nova Trilogy

Timothy S. Murphy (Oklahoma State University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1961 - 1964

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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The

Nova

trilogy, comprised of the novels

The Soft Machine

(1961, revised 1966),

The Ticket That Exploded

(1962, revised 1967) and

Nova Express

(1964), constitutes American novelist William S. Burroughs' most extensive and radical experiment with narrative form. Like most of Burroughs' work during the Sixties, these novels were composed using the “cut-up” method in which existing texts, including Burroughs' own writings and/or writings by other authors, were physically cut into pieces of variable length and re-assembled in random order to generate unexpected juxtapositions and new syntactic relationships. Burroughs developed the cut-up method in collaboration with the Anglo-Canadian painter and novelist Brion Gysin, who derived it from Dadaist and Surrealist techniques of visual…

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1317 words

Citation: Murphy, Timothy S.. "The Nova Trilogy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 December 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10822, accessed 24 April 2024.]

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