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Contemporary Women's Writing 2008 2(2):91-110; doi:10.1093/cww/vpn004
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Oedipus Meets Sacher-Masoch: Kathy Acker's Pornographic (Anti)Ethical Aesthetic

Suzette Henke

University of Louisville, USA

Correspondence: suzette.henke@louisville.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

If you scratch hard, you find that I’m a humanist in some weird way.

Kathy Acker, Hannibal Lecter, My Father (17)


   Pornography, Trauma, and Sadomasochism
 
The American author Kathy Acker was born in New York City in 1947. She studied poetry with Jerome Rothenberg and conceptual art with David Antin in San Diego before shifting her focus to countercultural fiction published with underground presses in the 1970s. Living in London a decade later, she emerged onto the international scene as a major avant-garde writer whose literary experimentation became notorious for its playful use of intertextuality, "plagiarism," and pornographic pastiche. Acker died prematurely, of breast cancer, in 1997. Where, one might ask, should one position the late Kathy Acker in the current conversation about ethics and representations of trauma and violence in postmodern literature? Does Acker's work suggest a feminist agenda behind the provocative parodies of romantic thralldom found everywhere in her work? Do texts . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Acker's Don Quixote and Sadomasochism
 

   Blood and Guts in High School as Oedipal Parody
 

   Conclusion: Ethical Resistance
 

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