Hyperbole Books · An SDSU Press Imprint

Devouring Institutions

The Life Work of Kathy Acker

Edited by Michael Hardin

Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker

Devouring Institutions · Hyperbole Books / San Diego State University Press

About the Book

Devouring Institutions gathers thirteen critical approaches to Kathy Acker, a writer whose fiction made plagiarism, pornography, theory, autobiography, punk antagonism, and literary theft collide. Michael Hardin conceived the collection after Acker's death in 1997, taking seriously the charge from the executor of her estate to "keep her work alive."

The result is an introduction that refuses to simplify its subject. The essays move through madness and paralysis, gender, the body, desire, Bataille, piracy, intellectual property, myth, performance, the Internet, and post-plagiarism. Together they read Acker not as a literary scandal to be domesticated but as an artist whose work keeps testing the institutions that authorize literature, sexuality, property, and critical thought.

First published by Hyperbole Books, an imprint of San Diego State University Press, the volume includes an introduction by Michael Hardin and a primary and secondary bibliography of Acker's work.

From Michael Hardin's Introduction

Hardin recalls organizing a 1996 conference at which Acker was the keynote speaker, and learning that while she was there she received the news that her biopsy was positive for breast cancer. After her death the following year, he asked the executor of her estate how she would have wanted to be remembered. The answer—"keep her work alive"—became the germ of this collection.

Hardin frames Devouring Institutions as an introduction to Acker: thirteen different ways of looking at one of the most innovative, controversial, and difficult American writers of her generation.

Archival artwork from the original Devouring Institutions page
From the original SDSU Press page
In Kathy Acker We Trust archival graphic
Archival Kathy Acker graphic

Advance Word

Contents

  • Kathy Acker: An Introduction — Michael Hardin
  • Writing between Madness and Paralysis
  • “The Madness Outside Gender: Travels with Don Quixote and Saint Foucault.” — Carol Siegel
  • “Kathy Acker and Literary Madness: Erecting a Pornographic Shell.” — Robert Mazzola
  • “The Paralyzing Tensions of Radical Art in a Postmodern World: Kathy Acker's Last Novels as Exploratory Fictions.” — Svetlana Mintcheva
  • Building the Body of Desires
  • “Re-Educating the Body: Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, and the Postmodern Body in My Mother: Demonology.” — Terry Engebretsen
  • “Too Much Is Never Enough: A Kaleidoscopic Approach to the Work of Kathy Acker.” — Gayle Fornataro
  • “The Lay of the Land: Piracy and the Iterant Body in Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates.” — Sheri Weinstein
  • “Between Theory and Autobiography: Negotiating Desire, Sex, and Love in the Work of Kathy Acker.” — Michael Hardin
  • Attacking Language
  • “Residues or Revolutions of the Language of Acker and Artaud.” — Carla Harryman
  • “Words Hurt! Acker's Appropriation of Myth in Don Quixote.” — Jan Corbett
  • “Kathy Acker's Radical Performance Writing in Eurydice in the Underworld and Other Texts.” — Catherine Rock
  • Post-Plagiarism
  • “Beyond Appropriation: Pussy, King of the Pirates and a Feminist Critique of Intellectual Property.” — Caren Irr
  • “Voice, Politics, Copyright.” — Nicole Cooley
  • “Scavenging the E-Wreck: Kathy Acker, the Internet, and Artis Electronica.” — Trevor Dodge
  • Kathy Acker: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography

From the SDSU Press Archive

The Press's archive preserves both the original Hyperbole page and later Aztec Paper posts for Devouring Institutions, including the full set of advance notices and the book's table of contents. Visit the original Hyperbole Books page · Visit the Aztec Paper feature.