Please visit the William Burroughs archives to register for full access to the site. As the materials in the online portal are still under copyright, the Estate of William S. Burroughs has asked that all users register for access. Once registered, researchers will have full access to the comparative module initially conceived of and encoded by Paul Ardoin and a team and University of Antwerp. From Dr. Burroughs Laboratory helmed by S. The documents include numerous cut ups, dream projects, and letters written by William S.
Burroughs, as well as the earliest extant drafts of Burroughs's Blade Runner a movie novella. Visit full information on Francois Bucher Papers. Blade Runner a movie is itself a curious project. Nourse's novel The Bladerunner. For more on the relationship between these texts, as well as the relationship between these texts and the later Ridley Scott film, see Paul Ardoin's "Versions, Cut Ups, and Bladerunners: Critique and Revision in Nourse and Burroughs," forthcoming in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
Burroughs's text, as published, is a take on the Hollywood screen "treatment," and is shaped as a fictional "pitch" of a movie idea, narrated by an unnamed figure to a listener named B. The novella and its various drafts make reference to Nourse's text and imagine its portrayal and possible complications on screen. This project gathers together the FSU drafts and typescript, along with a revised typescript held by Ohio State University, and creates a digital transcription of all the extant versions of the text, as well as a mark-up of Burroughs's and his proofreaders' amendments, notes, and doodles.
The site allows researchers to consult high quality scans of the original materials alongside the transcriptions. Additionally, the site includes tools that allow researchers to easily compare a single sentence across multiple drafts, providing new insight into Burroughs's process of composition. Special thanks to James Grauerholz, who was instrumental in locating, organizing, and reading these documents, and whose contribution to the original text is apparent throughout.
Project leads and Advisors: Paul Ardoin, Dr. Stanley E. Welcome to the genetic edition of William S. Burroughs' Blade Runner a movie.
