The
cut-up technique (or
découpé in
French) is an
aleatory literary technique in which a
text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to at least the
Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer
William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.