Nova Express | Literary Precedents

Nova Express Literary Precedents

The originality of Burroughs's work reduces the field of resemblance considerably, but the use of the "cut-up" or "fold-in" has some affinities with T. S. Eliot's poetry, John Dos Passos's trilogy U.S.A. (1930-1936), Ezra Pound's Cantos (1970), and some of the experiments in surrealism by French writers like Paul Valery. In a more conventional manner, Burroughs drew on the science fiction-adventure genre of the mid-twentieth century, and anticipated the cyber-punk mode of writers such as William Gibson.