The

trilogy, comprised of the novels

(1961, revised 1966),

(1962, revised 1967) and

(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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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 25 November 2024.]