I-SEARCH on William S. Burroughs and the cut-up method

I chose to do the I-SEARCH paper on William S. Burroughs’s cut-up method.  The cut-up method is a technique of writing that involves taking pieces of unrelated text and moving them within a body of text to create new stories.   And since the cut-up method was pretty easy to explain, I took it one step further in its classification of collage and classified it as bricolage.  Bricolage is a term originated by Claude Levi-Strauss, its meaning is basically work that is put together from the materials at hand.  Classifying the cut-up method as bricolage involved researching a completely different field separate from literature.  The search for information wasn’t hard.  There were articles available for Burroughs on the CSULA database, but the ones I was mostly interested in were not available.  This was not a huge hurdle because William S. Burroughs is a modern day author, so I went straight to the source by researching a ton of interviews.  The available interviews were abundant and I found hours of lectures he had given at schools to go along with them.  As for the research needed for Levi-Strauss’s bricolage, the CSULA database did have most of the articles I was interested in.  The one thing the CSULA library didn’t have was Levi-Strauss’s book The Savage Mind, which was the text that he originated the term in.  Besides The Savage Mind, everything went smoothly. 

            If I had to do it differently, I would have changed my topic.  In all the research, his opinion of Language and the Word interested me more than the cut-up method.  After doing the research on Claude Levi-Strauss who had his own Theory of Language, it made me want to compare Strauss to Burroughs.  In my research I also found Burroughs went far beyond the cut-up methods.  He would use exercises similar, but with tape recordings and film (montage).  So if I broadened the topic to Burroughs’s thoughts on language, I could have included all these separate methods that did not include written text. 

            Advice for anybody attempting this I-SEARCH paper, in the beginning of the research take the first few sources that are gathered and do a “Shitty First Draft” of the entire project.  Then go out and get the rest of the sources.  There is so much information out there, creating a backbone for your paper would make it much easier to sort through all of it.  Trying to weave 10 articles together into one topic is a tedious and contradicting task.   Having a first draft to bounce all the extra research off of to combat and replace your earlier ideas would have worked much better for myself.