Advertisement

Advertisement

cut-up technique

noun

  1. a technique of writing involving cutting up lines or pages of prose and rearranging these fragments, popularized by the novelist William Burroughs (1914–97)

“Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged” 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012


Discover More

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Handwritten lyrics for songs like “Fame,” Heroes” and “Ashes to Ashes” will also be on display, including examples of Bowie’s cut-up technique.

Read more on New York Times

The collection also features Brian Eno's EMS synthesizer, used on Bowie's 1977 albums Low and Heroes; and examples of his "cut-up" technique for lyric writing, which involved literally chopping up existing texts to generate new meanings from the rearranged pieces.

Read more on BBC

Like many of Burroughs’s rock progeny, Bowie was an adherent of the cut-up technique that originated with the Surrealists but was popularized in the late 1950s by Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin.

Read more on Washington Post

He even borrowed some of Burroughs’s methods, riffing on Burroughs’s “cut-up” technique in his own verse.

Read more on The New Yorker

The pandrogyne was their way of applying Burroughs’s and Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique to their own flesh.

Read more on New York Times

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement


cut-up poemcut velvet