When she does what she does: Intertextual desire and influence in Kathy Acker's narratives.
Item
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Title
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When she does what she does: Intertextual desire and influence in Kathy Acker's narratives.
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Identifier
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AAI3283144
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identifier
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3283144
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Creator
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Martin, Douglas A.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Literature, Comparative | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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American author and performance artist Kathy Acker established herself as one of the most prolific, inventive, and vital voices of third-wave feminist culture. Her theoretically complex and extensive body of work more than warrants full-length study. Within the province of this dissertation, I deal not only with all of Acker's works published during her lifetime, but also posthumous volumes; I pull heavily from two extensive archives containing numerous unpublished manuscripts and rich correspondence. Concerned as I am with Acker's positioning and repositioning of theoretical frames for her fictions and her milieus, I devote a fair share of space to the writings of her peers, critics, and inheritors. I allow her texts to bounce me out to points of signed significance, while I also read across her timeline and trace the valences of many of Acker's repeating concerns; Acker's texts are never purely hermeneutically sealed endeavors, and it is within this spirit that I operate. Through intertextual figures she herself employed, I show how she might be read in dialogue with the post-structuralism of a number of French theorists and their concerns. I also provide a sense of the lineage of avant-gardes Acker drew her feeling of expansive possibility from: art writers of the East coast, Charles Olson and Black Mountain poetics, Burroughs and his reality critiques, "New Narrative" and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school, as well as romantically modern literary icons. Acker's writing is all about this move: what, when, where, why, how, one might own (up to), how one might "spin" what one has done (in writing) and what one is about to do. Socially, psychologically, politically, in Acker, we will never be far from working and reworking definitions of who is normal, who has value, who is abominable and how and why, who is sick and who is sane, who should be confined, who is made to feel they warrant space, how, who belongs and who doesn't. Through Acker, I draw a blueprint for a queer liberation involving the opening of eyes, mouths, legs, and ultimately minds.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
