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    Great Expectations (Reissue)
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    Great Expectations (Reissue)
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    Great Expectations (Reissue)
    Ebook127 pages2 hours

    Great Expectations (Reissue)

    By Kathy Acker

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Kathy Acker’s practice of literary appropriation and pastiche made her notorious—as a rebel and a groundbreaker—when Great Expectations was first published in 1982. Here, she begins rewriting Charles Dickens’s classic—splicing it with passages from Pierre Guyotat’s sexually violent Eden, Eden, Eden, among other texts—alongside Acker’s trademark pithy dialogue, as well as prank missives to the likes of Susan Sontag, Sylvère Lotringer, and God.

    At the center of this form-shifting narrative, Acker’s protagonist collects an inheritance following her mother’s suicide, which compels her to revisit and reinterpret traumatic scenes from the past. Switching perspectives, identities, genders, and centuries, the speaker lustily ransacks world literature to celebrate and challenge the discourse around art, love, life, and death.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateFeb 27, 2018
    ISBN9780802146588
    Unavailable
    Great Expectations (Reissue)
    Author

    Kathy Acker

    Kathy Acker (Nueva York, 1947-Tijuana, 1997), novelista, ensayista y dramaturga, construyó una obra personalísima y renovadora a base de sintetizar influencias tan diversas como las de la narrativa de William S. Burroughs, Marguerite Duras o Gertrude Stein, el nouveau roman, la French Theory, el feminismo, la filosofía, el misticismo y la pornografía. Licenciada en Escritura Creativa por la Universidad de San Diego y con estudios de griego y literatura clásica, vivió entre Estados Unidos e Inglaterra y trabajó como administrativa, secretaria, stripper, performer porno y profe-sora de universidad. Entre sus títulos destacan Great Expectations (1982), relectura libérrima y subversiva del clásico de Dickens, la consagratoria Aborto en la escuela (1984), Don Quijote, que fue un sueño (1986) o El imperio de los sinsentidos (1988). Fotografía: ​© Corbis Premium Historical - Getty Images.

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    Reviews for Great Expectations (Reissue)

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    • 4/5
      The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.

      This is Jon typing. Jon has been reading. All day. Mortality has reaped recklessly as of late. Right now two people Jon loves are ill in a real bad way. Jon muses and frets. He reads. Jon loved this book despite it being Wrong. He'd love to quote and paste and rant-and-riff about LIFE. But he won't. Jon listens to Marcin Wasilewski and Morrissey. Jon can't turn off his brain. Jon wallows and wonders. He'd love to read more Acker, but not just yet.
    • 4/5
      "A narrative is an emotional moving ..." says Acker in Great Expectations, and that seems a fitting hypothesis for the work. It is a river of pathos, and all else is an uncontainable storm. Narrative voices shift frequently and characters are uprooted from time and place, transformed in name and gender. Acker is a skilled plagiarist in the most complimentary sense of the word, and this time uses Dickens' work, Melville's Moby Dick, and Reáge's Story of O as schema for her characters to live in. They argue, they whine, they fuck, they philosophize; stuck in a post-structural narrative, they announce repeatedly that they have no idea what any of it means. A central point Acker makes here is that language is indomitable. Another, that the artist isolates themselves and chases away love. The stereotype becomes the rule. That which is said becomes which is, because that is what we perceive. Maybe. And lots of cunts, always lots of cunts. Acker embraced this same narrative techniques many times over, and her work in the nineteen eighties employs them to excellent effect. This one hell of a book, and it gets even better from here.
    • 2/5
      Made me think!
    • 4/5
      In this novel Acker aims her critique at the gnarly intersection of capitalism, violence, sexual dysfunction, and male dominance. In order to live out this critique, Acker jettisons most of the (male-dominated) traditions of narrative as she writes, systematically disrupting the stability of characters and setting, and rejecting the claim to authorial originality (as you might guess from the title). Some might say that this rejection is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I'm more inclined to say it's form following function. Exemplary.