My third chapter investigates the use of tape recording as a mode of composition for late-modernists Jack Kerouac (Visions of Cody) and William S. Burroughs (The Ticket That Exploded). For Kerouac, the impulse was toward improvisatory transcription, but for Burroughs, tape was an integral part of his notorious “cut-up method.” I focus on the emergence of commercially available tape recording technologies in the 1950s and 1960s, which enabled amateurs to record as well as edit, loop, and manipulate recordings in other imaginative ways. In both novels that I explore, tapes play a key role within the plot; but they were also employed in the construction of the texts. As friends and collaborators with largely different approaches to tape, Kerouac and Burroughs demonstrate how the transformation of agency from consumer to producer of recordings shifted the ways writers imagined their literary projects.

This chapter examines Beat works of the 1960s to explain how they remade language use: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s novel Her, Gregory Corso’s novel The American Express, Ted Joans’s collage project The Hipsters, and William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up collaboration, Minutes to Go.