Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible

Georgina Colby

Published by Edinburgh University Press 2016

Kathy Acker

Writing the Impossible

Georgina Colby

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748683512

Overview
Contents

About this book

An in-depth analysis of the work of one of the twentieth century’s most innovative writers

Kathy Acker’s body of work is one of the most significant collections of experimental writing in English. In Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible, Georgina Colby explores Acker’s compositional processes and intricate experimental practices, from early poetic exercises written in the 1970s to her final writings in 1997. Through original archival research, Colby traces the stages in Acker’s writing and draws on her knowledge of unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, essays, illustrations, and correspondence to produce new ways of reading Acker’s works. Rather than treating Acker as a postmodern writer this book argues that Acker continued a radical modernist engagement with the crisis of language, and carried out a series of experiments in composition and writing that are comparable in scope and rigor to her modernist predecessors Stein and Joyce. Each chapter focuses on a particular compositional method and insists on the importance of avant-garde experiment to the process of making new non-conventional modes of meaning. Combining close attention to the form of Acker’s experimental writings with a consideration of the literary cultures from which she emerged, Colby positions Acker as a key figure in the American avant-garde, and a pioneer of contemporary experimental women’s writing.

Key Features

Examines unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, lecture notes, letters and manuscripts from the Kathy Acker Papers
Features eleven previously unpublished images of original manuscripts, correspondence, and colour illustrations from the Kathy Acker Papers
Utilises major archival study of Acker’s experimental compositional practices
Situates Acker as a late modernist writer and a key figure in the American Avant-Garde

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vi
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Kathy Acker and the Avant-Garde Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1. Writing Asystematically: Early Experimental Writings 1970–1979 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
Chapter 2. Collage and the Anxiety of Self-description: Blood and Guts in High School Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
Chapter 3. Writing-through: Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
Chapter 4. Intertextuality and Constructive Non-identity: In Memoriam to Identity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
Chapter 5. Montage and Creative Cutting: My Mother: Demonology Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	172
Chapter 6. Ekphrasis, Abstraction, and Myth: ‘From Psyche’s Journal’, Eurydice in the Underworld, ‘Requiem’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 312
Illustrations
- Other: 12 colour illustrations
Keywords: Literary Studies

eBook

Published: September 28, 2016
ISBN: 9780748683512