Extinction, Cut-Up: Species Revival and Literary Ecomodernism

This article examines the fantasies of species revival through the lens of William Burroughs’s literary ecomodernism—a characterization tied to his practice of the cut-up, and expanded through a reading of his late novella Ghost of Chance (1991). The first section traces Burroughs’s connection to the interdisciplinary cultures surrounding the Whole Earth Catalog (1968–71) and CoEvolution Quarterly (1974–85). The second reads de-extinction’s dreams of genetic agency through the lens of the cut-up, which helps to understand the implications of DNA’s linguistic analogy for species revival. The final section reads Ghost of Chance as a satirically misanthropic vision of species resurrection.